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2 results

  • Chapter 1 - Youth, Maturation, and Adult Sexuality

  • Edited by Michael Nowlin, University of Victoria, British Columbia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald
    Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 15-37

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the varied meanings of “youth” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Traditionally, this theme has been examined to the writer’s disadvantage as evidence of his unfortunate investment in adolescence and young adulthood and his dread of senescence, which for him usually set in at the age of thirty. This survey argues that age consciousness was endemic throughout early twentieth-century American culture, with psychologist G. Stanley Hall in particular defining youth as a period of fiery intensity soon lost to the enervating compromises of middle age. Fitzgerald’s literary treatment of this issue helped rewrite the adolescent experience, but his fear of growing old created curious anxieties about sexuality and sex itself, which is why his fiction typically fixates on the kiss instead of coitus.

  • ‘The changes and chances of this mortal life’: aspects of ageing in the fiction of Stanley Middleton

  • MIKE HEPWORTH
  • Journal:
    Ageing & Society / Volume 21 / Issue 6 / November 2001
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 April 2002, pp. 721-737
    Print publication:
    November 2001

  • Sociological research shows that individuals attempt to make sense of the meaning of the ageing process in the course of conversations with other people. The social construction of ageing is therefore an interactive process during which ideas and beliefs about ageing are negotiated and exchanged. Novels are a rich and easily accessible source of data on the social construction of the meaning of ageing during the course of social interaction and this paper explores the imaginative contribution of the English novelist Stanley Middleton to our awareness of these subtle processes. It is suggested that Middleton's fiction provides a particularly rewarding example of the contribution of the novelist to our understanding of the origins of the experience of growing older as a product of social interaction.