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Chapter 5 - The Technology Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2019

Jacob Jewusiak
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
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Summary

Focusing on H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, “The Technology Age” argues that the volatile modernity of Wells’s fiction pivots on a failure of sympathy between the young and the old. This failure generates the deeply ambivalent conditions by which generational antagonism arises alongside modernity’s technological and social progress. Drawing on the work of Charles Booth and tracts by the Fabian society, I illustrate how socialist arguments for a universal pension depend upon youths imagining the older person they one day will become. Analyzing works such as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Food of the Gods, and In the Days of the Comet, this chapter highlights the multitemporality of the banal process of aging. In this regard, science fiction provides insight into the reality of aging in a way that conventional literary realism cannot.

Type
Chapter
Information
Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf
, pp. 114 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • The Technology Age
  • Jacob Jewusiak, Newcastle University
  • Book: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
  • Online publication: 14 November 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615501.006
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  • The Technology Age
  • Jacob Jewusiak, Newcastle University
  • Book: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
  • Online publication: 14 November 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615501.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Technology Age
  • Jacob Jewusiak, Newcastle University
  • Book: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
  • Online publication: 14 November 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615501.006
Available formats
×