Literature and ageing / edited by Elizabeth Barry with Margery Vibe Skagen for the English Association.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Barry, Elizabeth, 1972- editor.

Skagen, Margery Vibe, editor.

English Association.

Series:

Essays and studies (London, England : 1950) ; 0071-1357 v. 73.

Essays and studies 2020, 0071-1357 ; volume 73

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Old age in literature--19th-21st centuries.

Old age in literature.

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Japanese literature--History and criticism.

Japanese literature.

Caribbean literature--History and criticism.

Caribbean literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

xi, 217 pages ; 23 cm.

Other Title:

Literature and aging

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : D.S. Brewer, 2020.

Summary:

"The central focus of this book is the experience of growing old as represented in literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: an experience shaped by changes in longevity, a new science of senescence, the availability of state pensions, and other phenomena of recent history. The collection considers the increasing prominence of stories of ageing, challenging the idea that old age is an uneventful time outside of the parameters of literary narrative. Instead, age increasingly is the story. As the older population swells, political crises are construed as the old stealing from the young, and the rights of older people are sacrificed to the economics of care, it becomes ever more important to think about and question, as literature does, the symbolic aspects of ageing - the cultural imaginary that determines the way that society sees old age. The work in this volume explores age stories in relation to futurity, precarity and climate change. It brings to light narratives of resistance to colonial imperialism and reproductive futurism framed in terms of age; and tests the lived experience of growing old and the challenge it offers to individualistic conceptions of selfhood, work and care. The literary works examined - hailing from England, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, and including texts by Margaret Drabble, Samuel Beckett and Matthew Thomas - ask how we feel about ageing - so often the determinant of how we think about it.

Contents:

Introduction: The Difference that Time Makes / Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen

On Not Knowing How to Feel / Helen Small

Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View From and Beyond Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises / Kathleen Woodward

Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction / Sarah Falcus

Grandpaternalism: Kipling's Imperial Care Narrative' / Jacob Jewusiak

"I Could Turn Viper Tomorrow": Challenging Reproductive Futurism in Merle Collins's The Colour of Forgetting / Emily Kate Timms

Critical Interests and Critical Endings: Dementia, Personhood and End of Life in Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves / Elizabeth Barry

Self-Help in the Historical Landscape of Ageing, Dementia, Work and Gender: Narrative Duplicities and Literature in a "Changing Place Called Old Age" / David Amigoni

Toying with the Spool: Happiness in Old Age in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape / Peter Svare Valeur

Afterword: When Age Studies and Literary-Cultural Studies Converge: Reading "The Figure of the Old Person" in an Era of Ageism / Margaret Morganroth Gullette.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 201) and index.

ISBN:

9781843845713

1843845717

OCLC:

1141497998