This Element focuses on the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations: not of a world lacking children, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging.
This book argues that the realist novel compresses the duration of aging into descriptive intervals, constructing senescence as a shameful event to be hidden. It will appeal to students and researchers of nineteenth-century literature and culture, the Victorian novel and to those with an interest in representations of age in literature.