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Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike - Softcover
Discovering the midlife progress novel, Gullette finds in recent fiction a pervasive tension between decline and a new ideology of aging. Appropriately, she invites the reader to join the writers in their therapeutic discourse.Rosemary Franklin, American Literature [This] book certainly makes you think. What is it that can happen in middle age to make itas it is for many peoplethe cearest and sweetest time of life?Frank Conroy, New York Times
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From the Inside Flap:
For many people today,disillusionment is the midlife plot: troubles compounded bylosses and ending in despair. Margaret Morganroth Gullette finds incontemporary fiction an alternative plot, one in which adult protagonists areultimately undaunted by their aging bodies, their inner weaknesses, theirresponsibility for their own lives, or the worst blows dealt them byfate.
Using the works of Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble,Anne Tyler, and John Updike, she reveals a genre that deals not with fear butwith desire, and not with youthful desire but with the wide range ofidiosyncratic midlife desires. She describes and analyzes a form of fictionthat resists and revises the traditional narrative of midlife decline.
Inventing older characters who can be rewarded,progress novels show how they grow by responding to the challenges of ordinarylife: living with another person, raising children, individuating from spouseand parents. These characters have survived the "dangerous age" ofyoung adulthood to reconceive themselves in the middle years.
Dr. Gullette highlights the gifts thataging has brought these characters: midlife resilience, personal power,fortitude, and gratitude for no longer being so young. . . . [F]or both womenand men, aging can feel like a cure.
. . . Her sometimes startling observations also offerreaders skills they can use to reinterpret their own lives and ultimately telltheir own "safe-at-last" stories. Safe at Last boldlyencourages us to reappropriate for adult trials and goals the hopeful languagemost often employed to describe childhood or adolescent growth. Thisbrilliantly written book about the colliding ideologies of aging will fascinatescholars in many disciplines and readers of all ages.
About the Author:
Using the works of Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble,Anne Tyler, and John Updike, she reveals a genre that deals not with fear butwith desire, and not with youthful desire but with the wide range ofidiosyncratic midlife desires. She describes and analyzes a form of fictionthat resists and revises the traditional narrative of midlife decline.
Inventing older characters who can be rewarded,progress novels show how they grow by responding to the challenges of ordinarylife: living with another person, raising children, individuating from spouseand parents. These characters have survived the "dangerous age" ofyoung adulthood to reconceive themselves in the middle years.
Dr. Gullette highlights the gifts thataging has brought these characters: midlife resilience, personal power,fortitude, and gratitude for no longer being so young. . . . [F]or both womenand men, aging can feel like a cure.
. . . Her sometimes startling observations also offerreaders skills they can use to reinterpret their own lives and ultimately telltheir own "safe-at-last" stories. Safe at Last boldlyencourages us to reappropriate for adult trials and goals the hopeful languagemost often employed to describe childhood or adolescent growth. Thisbrilliantly written book about the colliding ideologies of aging will fascinatescholars in many disciplines and readers of all ages.
A pioneer in age studies and one of the most influential cultural critics of the midlife, Margaret Morganroth Gullette is also the author of the prize-winning Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. She is a Resident Scholar in Women's Studies at Brandeis.
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- PublisherBackinprint.Com
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 0595091229
- ISBN 13 9780595091225
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages220
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