Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

Author: Robert Pogue HarrisonPublisher: University of Chicago PressPaperback:ISBN 10: 9780226381961ISBN 13: 978-0226381961Hardcover:ISBN 10: 022617199XISBN 13: 978-0226171999How old are you? The more thought you bring to bear on the question, the harder it is to answer. For we age simultaneously in different ways: biologically, psychologically, socially. And we age within the larger framework of a culture, in the midst of a history that predates us and will outlast us. Looked at through that lens, many aspects of late modernity would suggest that we are older than ever, but Robert Pogue Harrison argues that we are also getting startlingly younger—in looks, mentality, and behavior. We live, he says, in an age of juvenescence. Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the