Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Palgrave Handbook
of Literature and Aging
Edited by
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb
Aagje Swinnen
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging
“The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging, edited by Valerie Lipscomb and
Aagje Swinnen, is not only a deep, wide contribution to age studies in the humanities but a much-needed book. It forcefully demonstrates that the field is vibrant
and evolving, by bringing together essays from the field’s most exciting thinkers
and important innovators.”
—Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
“This lively, important collection marks a pivotal moment in age studies.
Established scholars have demonstrated over the past couple decades that reading
literature skillfully can help us understand aging and that understanding aging can
help us read literature. Lipscomb and Swinnen have invited a new cohort of emerging scholars to join those path builders to show that the expansive field has arrived
and is thriving. The resulting array of topics and approaches—broadening from
close reading to socially embedded reading practices—illustrates how literary studies is at the leading edge of humanities at work in the world.”
—Sally Chivers, Trent University
“As the editors intend, this handbook offers a ‘smorgasbord for literature lovers,’
a sensual as well as an intellectual experience, where we as readers can understand
literary gerontology as a work-in-progress by being offered a wide spectrum of
research on the subject in order to position ourselves in terms of our own lifecourse ‘in search of a more age-just future.’ Thus, The Palgrave Handbook of
Literature and Aging offers guidance to understand literary gerontological
research as an ongoing process—a pathway—to engage with the literature presented in terms of our own experience of growing old. Experiencing aging through
literary texts as socially and culturally determined makes this book meaningful for
all ages, and not only for lovers of literature.”
—Roberta Maierhofer, University of Graz, Austria
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb • Aagje Swinnen
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook of
Literature and Aging
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Contents
1 Introduction:
A Smorgasbord for Literature Lovers in
Search of More Age-Just Futures 1
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Aagje Swinnen
Part I Intersections and Intersectionalities 23
2 Audre
Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging 25
Elizabeth Barry
3 Visibility
of Older Black Women in Literature: Female
Ancestors in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow 41
Saskia M. Fürst
4 Magical
Realism and Older Age: García Márquez’s
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende’s
The Japanese Lover (2015) 59
Raquel Medina
5 Literacy
Narratives and Age Identity Across the Life Span 77
Lauren Marshall Bowen
v
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
vi
Contents
6 Revising
the Dementia Imaginary: Disability and Age-­
Studies Perspectives on Graphic Narratives of Dementia 97
Rebecca Garden and Erin Gentry Lamb
7 Queer
Theory and Narrating Age Outside the Norm of
(Re-)Productive Adulthood121
Linda Hess and Anika Ullmann
Part II Traveling Concepts 141
8 Growing
Older Without Children: Challenging the
(Re)production Narrative for Older Women143
Kate de Medeiros
9 Gerotranscendence
as Literary Theory: Reading the
Later Poems of Margaret Avison and W. B. Yeats159
Suzanne Bailey
10 Care Noir: Before and After COVID-19177
Helen Small
11 From
Mushroom Men to Mycorrhizal Relations:
Imagining Posthuman Aging and Care197
Amelia DeFalco
12 Intergenerationality,
Age, and Environment in Children’s
Picturebooks215
Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako
13 Age
in Contemporary Drama and Performance: The
Value of Considering Theatrical Time237
Julia Henderson
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Contents vii
Part III Methodological Innovations 257
14 Constructing
‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital
Approach259
Vanessa Joosen
15 Finding
the Right Wor(l)ds: Creative Writing as Aesthetic
and Existential Practice in Later Life283
Oddgeir Synnes
16 Creative
Explorations for the Theatrical ‘Age Turn’:
Toward a New Dramaturgy of Older Age305
Núria Casado-Gual
17 (Re)interpreting
Aging by Reading: Creativity, Wisdom,
and Quality of Life in Older Age329
Emma Domínguez-Rué and Maricel Oró-Piqueras
18 Reading
as Caring: Older Lay Readers’ Responses to the
Dementia Narrative Stammered Songbook347
Aagje Swinnen
19 Age
and Its Metaphors367
Anita Wohlmann
Part IV Archival Inquiries 389
20 Age
Identity in Old and Middle English Literature391
Harriet Soper
21 Fantasies
of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture413
Christopher Martin
22 “A
Female, & Past 60 Years of Age!”: Older Age in
Women’s Later Life Writing 1800–1850435
Amy Culley
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
viii
Contents
23 American
Modernity and the Narrative Arcs of Aging453
Melanie Dawson
24 S
ex and the Senex: The Weight of Tradition in Desire
under the Elms471
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb
25 Grief
Representation in Late Poetry: Thomas Hardy’s
“Poems of 1912–13” and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters487
Heike Hartung
26 Gerontological
Poetry of the Scandinavian Welfare State507
Nicklas Freisleben Lund and Peter Simonsen
27 Affirmations
of Aging Masculinity in Victorian Fiction:
Older Men at the Margins529
Alice Crossley
28 Aging
and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies551
Jacob Jewusiak
Part V Finale 567
29 Are
Older People Still Human? On Ageist Humor569
Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Index591
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Notes on Contributors
Suzanne Bailey is Professor of English Literature at Trent University in
Peterborough, Canada. She is the author of Cognitive Style and Perceptual
Difference in Browning’s Poetry and has published on nineteenth-century
intellectual history and Canadian travel writing and poetry. Her research
includes work on Canadian printmaking and women writers.
Elizabeth Barry is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of
Warwick, UK. She has published widely in literary age studies, including
on age in Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Alice Munro. She edited
Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen in 2020 and is writing a
monograph on aging and time.
Lauren Marshall Bowen is Associate Professor of English and Director
of Composition at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research
interests include composition pedagogy, writing and literacy development
across the life span, and age inclusivity in postsecondary education.
Núria Casado-Gual is an Associate Professor at the University of Lleida.
As an age-studies scholar, she has published extensively on cultural explorations of older age, including three co-edited volumes of essays and a
special issue on age and performance. As a theater practitioner, she has
also examined aging from and through the stage.
Alice Crossley is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Her
research focuses on Victorian aging and masculinity. In addition to editing
special issues on aging (ACH, 2021 with Amy Culley; Nineteenth-Century
ix
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
x
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Gender Studies, 2017) and a monograph Male Adolescence in Victorian
Fiction (Routledge 2018), she has recent work in 19 and Yearbook of
English Studies and has published multiple book chapters. She also
researches nineteenth-century valentines.
Amy Culley is an Associate Professor at the University of Lincoln and the
author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community,
and Collaboration (Palgrave 2014). Her research ‘On Growing Old:
Women’s Late Life Writing 1800–1850’ was supported by a British
Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2020), and she has contributed to
books and special issues on women’s life writing and aging.
Melanie Dawson is Professor of English at William & Mary, where she
teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. She is the author of
Emotional Reinventions (2015) and Edith Wharton and the Modern
Privileges of Age (2020) and has edited and co-edited several volumes,
including an age studies issue of SAF (2019) with Sari Edelstein.
Amelia DeFalco is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the
University of Leeds. She is the author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in
Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State University Press 2010), Imagining
Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (University of
Toronto Press 2016), and Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care
(Oxford University Press 2023).
Kate de Medeiros is a Professor in the Department of Gerontology and
Sociology at Concordia University. Her work broadly explores the experience of later life. She has authored more than 60 articles and chapters and
3 books. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of
Health, the Alzheimer’s Association, and others.
Emma Domínguez-Rué, PhD (2005), has published various articles on
the interaction between gender and aging, and her experience includes the
editing of three volumes. She is an Associate Professor and Serra-Hunter
Fellow in the Department of English and Degree Coordinator for English
Studies at the University of Lleida.
Sarah Falcus works at the intersection of aging studies and literary studies. She has research interests in children’s literature and science and speculative fiction. She is the co-author of Contemporary Narratives of
Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics and the co-editor of Contemporary
Narratives of Ageing, Illness and Care (both with Katsura Sako). Falcus
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
currently is a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary
Research in Aging and Care at the University of Graz.
Saskia M. Fürst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English
at the University of The Bahamas. She holds a PhD from the University of
Salzburg (Austria). Recently, she co-edited the volume Contemporary
Quality TV: The Auteur, the Fans and Constructions of Gender (LitVerlag,
2021) with Ralph J. Poole.
Rebecca Garden, PhD, is Associate Professor of Public Health and
Preventive Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She is published in journals such as New Literary History, Literature and Medicine,
Disability Studies Quarterly, The AMA Journal of Medical Ethics,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and The Journal of Medical
Humanities.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, an internationally renowned age critic,
is the author of award-winning books, including Ending Ageism, or How
Not to Shoot Old People and Agewise. American Eldercide is forthcoming
(2024). She publishes in the mainstream and in literary/cultural/academic/left/feminist journals—works often cited as notable in Best
American Essays.
Heike Hartung, PhD, is an independent scholar in English Studies,
affiliated with the University of Potsdam, Germany. In her publications
she focuses on the interdisciplinary fields of aging, disability, and gender
studies. She is the author of Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone
Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman (2016).
Julia Henderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of
British Columbia. Her dissertation explored representations of aging and
older age in contemporary North American theater. She now studies collaborative creation with people with lived experience of dementia and creative accessibility strategies for older performers.
Linda Hess is a Senior Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher in American
Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She is the author of
Queer Aging in North American Fiction (2019). Her research focuses on
grievability in environmental narratives, as well as on intersections of
humor and ecocriticism.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
xii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jacob Jewusiak is a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. His first
book, Aging, Duration, and the English Novel, was published by Cambridge
University Press. His articles have appeared in NOVEL, ELH, SEL, and
Textual Practice. He is working on a second book, titled The Ageing of
Empire: Colonizing Care from Young England to Young India.
Vanessa Joosen is Professor of English Literature and Children’s
Literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where she leads the
ERC-funded project Constructing Age for Young Readers and runs the
Children’s Literature Summer School. She is the author of Adulthood in
Children’s Literature (2018) and edited Connecting Childhood and Old
Age in Popular Media (2018).
Erin Gentry Lamb is Carl F. Asseff, MD, MBA, JD, Designated
Professor of Medical Humanities, Faculty Lead of the Humanities Pathway,
and Associate Professor of Bioethics at the Case Western Reserve University
School of Medicine. She is one of the founding chairs of the North
American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS).
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb, a Professor of English at the University of
South Florida, specializes in representations of age in drama. Palgrave
Macmillan published her monograph, Performing Age in Modern Drama,
and a collection edited with Leni Marshall, Staging Age: The Performance
of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film. She serves as treasurer of the North
American Network in Aging Studies.
Nicklas Freisleben Lund is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Danish
Aging Research Center/Centre for Uses of Literature at the University of
Southern Denmark. He has published several articles on contemporary
and modern literature. His research areas include representations of class
in Danish literature, narrative endings, and literary gerontology.
Christopher Martin is Professor of English specializing in Renaissance
culture. His work in age studies includes Constituting Old Age in Early
Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear (2012) and
the forthcoming Cultural History of Old Age in the Early Modern Era,
1400–1650 edited with Jaco Zuijderduijn.
Raquel Medina is a Visiting Research Fellow at Aston University and
Dean of Area Studies at IES Abroad Barcelona. She is the author and coeditor of several books, articles, and book chapters on Spanish poetry,
film, narrative, and theater, as well as on cultural representations of aging
and dementia across cultures.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
Maricel Oró-Piqueras is an Associate Professor in the Department of
English and Linguistics at the University of Lleida and the main researcher
of Grup Dedal-­Lit since 2022. Her research interests include aging and
older age in contemporary fiction as well as representations of gender and
aging in film and television.
Katsura Sako is Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. She has
published widely on aging, gender, contemporary fiction, and children’s
literature. She is the co-author of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia:
Ethics, Ageing, Politics and the co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of
Ageing, Illness and Care (both with Sarah Falcus).
Peter Simonsen is a Professor at the University of Southern Denmark who
has published widely within literary gerontology and more broadly in literary studies. He is involved in various attempts to move literary gerontology toward more empirical projects on topics such as dementia, retirement,
and end of life. He is generally interested in investigating the ‘arts of aging.’
Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at
the University of Oxford, is the author of The Long Life (2007; winner of
the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, 2008, and the British
Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2008), and subsequent essays on
literary and philosophical aspects of aging. Her other books include The
Value of the Humanities (2013).
Harriet Soper is the Simon and June Li Fellow in English at Lincoln
College, University of Oxford. She has published on various aspects of
Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English literature, and her research
focuses especially on representations of the life course.
Aagje Swinnen is Professor of Aging Studies at Maastricht University
(NL). Her research topics include aging in literature, photography, and
film; literature-based approaches in dementia care; and late-life creativity
of professional artists. Swinnen is co-founder of the European Network in
Aging Studies and co-editor of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities.
Oddgeir Synnes is an Associate Professor at VID Specialized
University and literary scholar working in the fields of health humanities,
narrative gerontology, and existential care. In particular, Synnes has
worked on practical as well as research projects studying the use of creative
writing and storytelling in care for older adults, in palliative care, and in
dementia care.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
xiv
Notes on Contributors
Anika Ullmann is a freelancing academic. Her research focuses are age,
queerness, and hacker novels as twenty-first-century Robin Hood narratives. She has published on the relevance of age studies for children’s literature studies and the construction of age and queerness in young
adult media.
Anita Wohlmann is Associate Professor of Contemporary Anglophone
Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. She is coeditor of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities and a member of NANAS’
governing council. Her most recent monograph is Metaphor in Illness
Writing: Battle and Fight Reused (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1
Fig. 6.2
Fig. 6.3
Fig. 6.4
Fig. 6.5
Fig. 12.1
Fig. 12.2
Fig. 12.3
Fig. 14.1
Fig. 14.2
Fig. 14.3
Fig. 21.1
The final panel of a scene on page 89 of Joyce Farmer; Special
Exits; Fantagraphics Books, 2010
98
Panels from page two of Paco Roca; Wrinkles; Fantagraphics
Books, 2016
103
Panels from page 27 of Paco Roca; Wrinkles; Fantagraphics
Books, 2016
105
Page 62 of Dana Walrath; Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through
the Looking Glass; Penn State UP, 2016
108
A panel from page 89 of Joyce Farmer; Special Exits;
Fantagraphics Books, 2010
113
Illustration from Jiichan no naisho no umi [Grandpa’s Secret
Sea], by Mitsutoyo Yamauchi et al., Kousei shuppan, 1993
228
Illustration from Jiichan no naisho no umi [Grandpa’s Secret
Sea], by Mitsutoyo Yamauchi et al., Kousei shuppan, 1993
230
Illustration from Jiichan no naisho no umi [Grandpa’s Secret
Sea], by Mitsutoyo Yamauchi et al., Kousei shuppan, 1993
231
Visualization of the distribution of speech by adult and older
adult characters in the annotated children’s books
273
Scattertext with direct speech of older adults versus adults in
81 Dutch children’s books
273
Scattertext with direct speech of older adults versus adults in
75 English children’s books
274
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Der Jungbrunnen; 1546; cat. no.
593; © Statliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie/Jörg
P. Anders, www.bpk-­bildagentur.de/redirect.php?8,4aaf5708
aa2e8fd3b631b3ee71613faf419
xv
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
xvi
List of Figures
Fig. 21.2
Fig. 21.3
Fig. 29.1
Fig. 29.2
Fig. 29.3
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Ungleiches Paar; 1531;
Gemäldegalerie der Akademie det bildenden Künste Wien/
Academy of Fine Arts Vienne, Paintings Gallery
Anthony Corthoys’s Der Jungofen für Frauen; c. 1550; ©
Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha
“THAT WAS HUMAN??” from Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott;
Zits, Boston Globe, March 13, 2019, p. G8. Zits © 2019 ZITS
Partnership, Dist. By King Features Syndicate, Inc.
“Thank God I can still drive” from DCI Studios. Tomato
Cards, no date, www.prgreetings.com
“A Fairy Godmother” from Nicole Hollander; Sylvia;
September 10, 2002
421
422
575
578
584
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
List of Tables
Table 8.1
Table 14.1
Table 14.2
Table 16.1
Table 16.2
Table 16.3
Table 18.1
Participant demographic characteristics from the NIAfunded study, Generativity and Lifestyles of Older Women
(GLOW)149
CAFYR’s age model
264
Distribution of speech by adult and older adult characters in
the annotated children’s books
272
Pseudonyms and ages of respondents to the study
310
Respondents’ views broken down into strands, themes, and
subthemes311
Dramaturgical outline of the piece with the list of dramatic
situations and themes, subthemes, and research topics
associated with each scene
317
Participants of the 2017 reading and writing group, with
self-­selected aliases
352
xvii
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Smorgasbord for Literature
Lovers in Search of More Age-Just Futures
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Aagje Swinnen
Why a Major Volume on Literature and Aging Now?
For more than 30 years, scholars have explored what it means to grow
older in Western culture as depicted in and shaped by literary texts. More
recently, critics have been attending specifically to society’s endemic ageism and the literature that resists it. As editors, we launch this handbook
during an exciting period for literary age studies, a flowering of scholarly
interest across periods and genres at a time when newly published literature is portraying characters of a wider array of ages. Take, for example,
Bess Wohl’s recent comic drama Grand Horizons, which centers on a couple considering divorce after 50 years of marriage. The husband and wife
V. B. Lipscomb (*)
Department of English, University of South Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA
e-mail: vlipscom@usf.edu
A. Swinnen
Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University, Maastricht,
The Netherlands
e-mail: a.swinnen@maastrichtuniversity.nl
1
V. B. Lipscomb, A. Swinnen (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of
Literature and Aging,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50917-9_1
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
2
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
are fully rounded, dynamic characters rather than “geezer” stereotypes,
and the action truly revolves around them rather than the emotional reactions of their children. Nancy asks for a divorce as she insists on finally
being understood in her later years as a whole person, not only as a wife
and mother. Not long ago, a play would have been called novel, even
groundbreaking, to focus squarely on protagonists in their 70s grappling
with issues of later-life fulfillment. Such a drama most likely would have
been serious and aimed at a niche audience. This play, however, is a Neil
Simonesque comedy that is being widely produced around the United
States. The 2020 New York Times review notes that the parents’ characters
are “complexly” drawn but faults the show for less-plausible renderings of
the younger characters (Green). That kind of reversal in depth of characterization is nothing short of remarkable.
As we offer a handbook intended to be of value to both scholars and
students, we note that those who are new to literary age studies have a rich
store of volumes written during the past few decades awaiting them, from
pioneers such as Barbara Frey Waxman and Kathleen Woodward to new
monographs by Linda Hess and Jacob Jewusiak. Accompanying the recent
growth in literature about older people is a spurt of large academic books
that (at least in part) address literature and aging. Within this context, we
designed a comprehensive volume that explores relevant critical theories,
spotlights new methods, and addresses a full range of texts across literary
genres and historical periods. The current proliferation of scholarship
brings to mind that, back in 1990, Anne Wyatt-Brown wrote that “literary
gerontology comes of age” (echoed in the introduction to the 2014 inaugural issue of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities: “Age Studies Comes
of Age”). Thirty years later, Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen
claim that “a second wave of literary age studies has begun,” which they
understand as “a wave more critical of its own practices; more concerned
to theorize the given representations; looking to define the role of literature in the historical, social and political consciousness of older age”
(2020, pp. 6–7). Wyatt-Brown used a typical life-course narrative (a progress narrative) to sketch the developments of a new field while Barry and
Vibe Skagen employed the common wave metaphor to paint the relation
between generations of scholars within that field—the later generation
always positioned as being critical of the former. We as editors of this volume would like to suggest a slightly different perspective. We emphasize
that the study of aging in relation to literature is continually evolving,
always in discussion with other disciplines, and avidly exploring new
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
3
approaches that stand on “the shoulders of giants.” Consequently, the aim
of this Handbook of Literature and Aging is to both take stock of the
impressive work that has been done and look forward to exciting new
avenues for established and emerging scholars as well as students whom
we hope to attract to the field.
We deliberately call the volume a Handbook of Literature and Aging
rather than a Handbook of Literary Age or Aging Studies or even Literary
Gerontology. As co-editors, we oscillate between age and aging studies for
reasons that others already have addressed very eloquently (cf. Looser).
Age studies, a term coined by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, has the
advantage of resonating with other critical identity-based inquiries such as
gender and race studies. We are acutely aware that older people have been
marginalized in humanities-based scholarly work, and age studies aims to
end that marginalization by “pitching a bigger tent.” Age studies welcomes examination of the full spectrum of the life course, emphasizing
that every human has an (ever-advancing) age. It also makes its activist
component visible; Gullette encourages us to intervene in the public
sphere as age critics committed to the fight for age justice. This is also
what she demonstrates in her concluding chapter for this volume analyzing everyday ageist humor as it is practiced in cartoons, which she contrasts with what she calls “anti-ageist art.” The downside is that our field
has been slow in fulfilling the promise of age studies, as we most often
concentrate on the older end of the age spectrum and have not yet been
very successful at recruiting scholars who focus on younger ages. Age
studies also can unwittingly continue to marginalize the older person as it
surveys the complete age continuum. Using the term aging studies, on the
other hand, foregrounds that age is not a fixed category or stage in the life
course, but a dynamic life-long process characterized by its longer duration and unstable boundaries (cf. Jewusiak). The label of aging studies
aligns itself easier with what is known as cultural and critical gerontology
because the common understanding of the term is that it focuses on the
later years. That, however, is a double-edged sword in that, in English, the
lay term aging in practice tends to apply only to older people, despite the
fact that everyone is always aging. It also implies that people categorized
as “old” are the most underprivileged category and, therefore, scholarly
attention is urgent. Furthermore, the preference for a term may depend
on the context within which one presents their work or with whom one
wants to enter into dialogue. Identifying as a literary gerontologist, for
example, could be a strategy to alert colleagues from the social sciences to
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
4
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
contributions of humanities scholars. While aging suits our volume’s title
best, we also affirm the value of age studies by using it here in the introduction. Our contributors have been encouraged to use the terms that they
prefer in the contexts of their chapters. In short, we advocate a pragmatic
stance that serves the purpose of the scholarly writing itself.
While the choice of aging in our volume’s title participates in an ongoing debate within our field, one might assume that literature is self-­evident.
However, we consciously push the boundaries of how literature and literary studies are defined. The handbook encompasses not only analyses of
traditional literary artifacts, but also explorations of distinct literary practices. Chapters examine “texts” in the form of transcribed interviews,
reported reading experiences, and creative writing exercises. We address
what literature may bring to the study of age and aging, continuing a subject that we first reflected on with Cynthia Port in Frame in 2017. We
again acknowledge that literary fiction works differently from non-fiction
and has transformative potential in terms of how we can diversify our
understanding of aging experiences and build a more age-just world. But
we also call for new approaches to increase our understanding of how literature intervenes in largely ageist societies. For this reason, following a
more postcritical approach (cf. Swinnen), we include chapters not only on
literary works but also on uses of literature that require different methodologies from expert readings—oppositional, resistant, repairing—commenting on and assessing the critical possibilities of narrative content. At
a time when academic literary studies is contracting rather than expanding, a postcritical approach also invites us to reflect more on our role as
scholars and the efforts we undertake to engage and collaborate with lay
people across ages, to honor their lived experiences and knowledge.
The Design of the Handbook
This book project started several years ago when Palgrave invited co-­editor
Valerie Barnes Lipscomb to create a peer-reviewed volume on literature
and aging for Palgrave’s Handbook series. She was given free rein to
choose collaborators and contributors, so she immediately asked Aagje
Swinnen to co-edit, recognizing not only Aagje’s leadership in the field
but also that literary age studies is very much an international conversation. Together, we invited proposals from pioneers and seminal thinkers of
the field as well as earlier-career scholars. It is especially gratifying as this
long project reaches completion to know that additional valuable voices
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
5
are joining the age-studies chorus constantly. Having been active in literary age studies for two decades, we are aware that, currently, the highest-­
impact scholars are based in the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, and Europe. They most often have a background in English or
American Studies and concentrate on English-language literature. Most
are active collaborators in the European and/or North American Network
in Aging Studies, professional organizations that the co-editors helped
found with numerous international partners. While we always advocate for
expansion of the field, these current scholarly foci necessarily affect the
parameters of this volume. We acknowledge the limitations of this
Anglophone emphasis and address the problem of canon formation in the
section on Archival Inquiries.
To compose a comprehensive Handbook, we first asked the contributors for input regarding the genre, time period, national context, and language of the literary texts addressed, the theoretical approach, and method
of the envisioned contribution. Most important, we asked them what
innovations or interventions in the field they would propose. Based on this
input and feedback from peer reviewers, we arrived at dividing the book
into four main parts: Intersections and Intersectionalities, Traveling
Concepts, Methodological Innovations, and Archival Inquiries. This
arrangement acknowledges that many age-studies scholars focus on contemporary texts, which dominate the first three parts. However, the final
part shows the burgeoning interest in the field from literary scholars across
historical periods. These chapters interrogate age, aging, and ageism in
works from the medieval period through the twenty-first century. We have
been mindful in this division of the handbook to represent a range of
genres as well, such as novels, poetry, drama, life writing, and myth.
Purposely, we did not ask for typical literary essays: Each chapter begins
with a critical contexts section that provides a more substantial introduction to its subject and concludes by suggesting directions for future
research. While each chapter is expected to survey the sub-field it addresses,
the focus is on advancing this growing field. We emphasized collaboration
in the process, including organizing a workshop with the authors of each
part to secure internal cohesion and to further invigorate the currency of
the conversation.
Before we introduce the different chapters by section, we want to
address some of the choices we made regarding the importance of inclusive language. Throughout the book, we have opted for the adjectives
older and younger in combination with substantives such as person, age,
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
6
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
and life to signal that age delineations are relative rather than using them
as essentializing categories. By the same token, we use the phrase person
who lives with dementia. In doing so, we acknowledge that language is
always in flux and that we follow current debates on the politics of language. In a time when there is increasing sensitivity to use more appropriate terms in reference to age, gender, race, et cetera, we hope that also
within and beyond age studies there will be more awareness about and
reflection on the impact of words (cf. the 2022 “Forum on Contested
Language” in Age, Culture, Humanities co-edited by June Oh et al., as
well as the 2023 response by Helen Small).
Part 1: Intersections and Intersectionalities
The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw
(1989) to explain the interplay of race, class, and gender inequalities in the
lived experiences of women of color who have experienced abuse. This
interplay affected their ability to access support services and legal aid.
Since its introduction, intersectionality has developed into a key concept
of critical race studies and has been incorporated into other fields to
address how interconnections of race, class, gender, disability, et cetera
affect lived experience and equity. The field of age studies has recognized
and embraced the utility of the concept of intersectionality. Toni Calasanti
and Sadie Giles, for instance, have thought through what intersectionality
can mean when writing about age-related injustices:
[A]ge is an axis of inequality, and … old age is a disadvantaged position that
in itself is insufficient to deny individuals social participation. Further, age is
dynamic, and people shift from a privileged to a disadvantaged status gradually, creating a complex identity based on other intersectional locations. The
most privileged among us will eventually experience old-age oppression, if
long-lived enough. (73)
Conversely, Calasanti and Giles argue that “people do not ‘age out’ of
inequalities that exist earlier in life. Instead, these disparities can become
compounded in old age, and generalizations about ‘old people’ can result
in research or interventions that decrease the quality of life for some group
of elders” (73). A case in point is the “successful aging” ideology that not
only obscures the fact that not all older people have the financial means to
adopt leisurely third-age lifestyles, but also positions disability and disease
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
7
in older age—and, by extension, any age—as an undesirable state to be
avoided at all costs. It implies that if one can be successful at aging, one
also could fail at it. A critique of the successful aging framework appears in
many chapters of the Handbook.
What does intersectionality mean to the study of age in literature and to
our volume in particular? Back in 1990, Anne Wyatt-Brown called for
more intersectional perspectives in “The Coming of Age of Literary
Gerontology,” specifically the intersection of age and race, and she critiqued the predominance of Anglophone perspectives in the field:
Despite the many categories that exist, some topics have not been adequately
covered. Only one short study of aging blacks in fiction exists (Deck 1985),
and few scholars employ a feminist perspective (George 1986). Further the
choice of topics suggests that many critics assume that Americans and
Britons are the sole writers of English. This ethnocentrism should be challenged by analyses of the novels of Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Jolley,
V.S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, and Chinua Achebe, among
others. (310)
Twenty-five years later, in “Literature and Ageing,” a brief state-of-the-art
chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology (2015), Sarah
Falcus writes that intersectionality in literary age studies is now “flourishing, particularly around age and gender.” However, she also identifies
areas of research that remain underexplored, such as aging masculinities
and the connections between age and race and age and sexuality (58).
Furthermore, Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen include several
chapters in their book that adopt intersectional approaches connecting age
to “race, geopolitics, and class as well as gender” (6). Intersectionality has
become a foundational concept in age studies, but there is still much work
to be done.
It is only natural then that our Handbook is rich in contributions that
take an intersectional perspective. Elizabeth Barry is inspired by Paula
Dressel, Meredith Minkler, and Irene Yen to apply a life-course perspective to intersectionality. She examines the intersection of age, gender, sexuality, and race in the political writings and poetry of the African American
poet, feminist activist, and academic Audre Lorde. Barry argues that Lorde
practices a self-conscious life-course study through auto-ethnographic
writing. Lorde’s self-reflections on same-sex parenting, lesbian erotic
desire, and Black feminist thinking enable her to intervene in normative
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
8
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
conceptions of Black and female identity, femininity, and feminism. Saskia
Fürst analyzes the intersection of race, age, and gender in Praisesong for
the Widow (1983) by Paule Marshall. She illustrates how the novel resists
stereotypes of older age and Black women, including the asexual mammy
figure, hypersexualized jezebel, and angry matriarch. Fürst writes that
novels by Black US and Anglophone Caribbean women writers feature
midlife and older Black women who engage with the supernatural (through
trickster performativity and spiritual temporalities) to find a place in spaces
that are hostile to them and subvert essentialized stereotypes that render
them invisible and undesirable. Raquel Medina focuses on the intersection of gender and age, as well as that of race and sexuality, in her comparative reading of two works by acclaimed magical-realist novelists,
Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and
Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover (2015). Medina argues that magical
realism has the potential to offer a decolonial perspective in the form of a
third space (cf. Homi Bhabha) that allows for a reconsideration of hegemonic understandings of age, sexuality, race, temporality, and death.
Through analyzing the sexuality of older men versus older women and the
meaning of younger “racialized” female characters for the sexuality of
older men, Medina concludes that Allende’s book outweighs García
Márquez’s in the fulfillment of this potential, especially through its suggestion of temporal simultaneity and the reunion of lovers beyond life
and death.
While these three chapters address the call for more scrutiny of the
intersection between age and race and age and sexuality, the chapter by
Lauren Marshall Bowen examines the meanings of age (childhood,
adulthood, older age, and generational identities) relating to literacy
development. Her disciplinary perspective from rhetoric and composition
(a primarily US emphasis on writing studies) approaches literacy as a crucial difference that often stands in for other identity markers such as age,
class, and gender. Through her analysis of the literacy narratives Educated
(2018) by Tara Westover and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995),
Bowen demonstrates how literacy is framed as the pathway to mature
adulthood, morality, independence, and agency, which can result in tensions and conflict between generations.
The chapters by Barry, Fürst, and Medina illustrate how the fields of
postcolonial studies, Black studies, age studies, and feminist literary criticism can productively be brought into dialogue. Bowen’s contribution
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
9
bridges writing studies and literary age studies. Several other chapters
bring perspectives together by means of interdisciplinary dialogues.
Rebecca Garden and Erin Gentry Lamb draw from graphic medicine,
disability studies, and age studies to analyze the graphic dementia narratives Paco Roca’s Wrinkles (2016), Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s (2016),
and Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits (2010). They address how these works
offer counter narratives to the prevailing negative dementia imaginary in
three ways. First, these narratives presume competence in people living
with dementia. Second, they show how narrative identity is an intersubjective and co-creative process between people who live with dementia and
their surroundings. Finally, they open up spaces (pauses or beats) that
invite readers to change their understanding of and practices surrounding
dementia. Linda Hess and Anika Ullmann operationalize concepts from
queer studies, such as straight time, reproductive futurism, and growing
sideways, to further enrich reflections on temporality in age studies. Based
on the analysis of a diverse corpus of young adult literature, novels, and
graphic novels, including Mirjam Müntefering’s Verknallt in Camilla
(2004) and Hiromi Goto and Anna Xu’s Shadow Life (2021), they sketch
a development in contemporary literature toward space to imagine queer
older futures. Still, new possibilities come with new oppositions between
younger and older people and norm-confirming tendencies, Hess and
Ullmann argue.
After establishing the prominence of intersectionality in age studies, in
the next section, we group chapters together that intersect with fields such
as care studies or ecocriticism, but through the notion of traveling concepts—fully acknowledging that intersectionality itself is a traveling
concept.
Part 2: Traveling Concepts
As literary age studies continues to develop, terms resurface or are newly
introduced as conceptual tools. Many of these tools that serve to inform a
methodological approach in scholarly contributions are adapted from
other disciplinary contexts. We use Mieke Bal’s term traveling concept to
refer to these transdisciplinary ideas and acknowledge that they often are
at the center of communication and negotiation when scholars of aging
bring different academic backgrounds to collaborative work. As Bal writes,
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
10
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
Concepts … are the sites of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative
exchange. Agreeing doesn’t mean agreeing on content, but agreeing on the
basic rules of the game: if you use a concept at all, you use it in a particular
way so that you can meaningfully disagree on content. That use doesn’t go
without saying. Intersubjectivity in this sense remains the most important
standard for teaching and writing. (13)
In short, the meaning of a concept cannot be taken for granted as it is ever
shifting, not in the least because the context of application requires adaptation. When one discipline borrows a tool of academic discourse from
another, it may transform the understanding of that concept for both disciplines as a result. This is what the section “Traveling Concepts” hopes to
demonstrate.
We start the section with a chapter illustrating the narrative turn in age
studies, which was highlighted as one of the major “conceptualizations of
age that inform research practices in both the social sciences and the
humanities” at the first conference of the European Network in Aging
Studies in 2011 (Swinnen and Port 11). Gerontologist Kate de Medeiros
shows how the concept of narrative has traveled from literary studies to
narrative gerontology, presenting the narrative perspectives of 13 older
women without children who were part of the large four-year qualitative
study Generativity and Lifestyles of Older Women. The guiding question
of her chapter is to what extent these women align with or resist dominant
cultural narratives of productivity as they are crystallized in the negative
stereotypes surrounding older women who did not reproduce. Including
the chapter in a handbook of literature results from our editorial stance to
question how literature has been defined inside and outside age studies
and to acknowledge the important work within social-sciences approaches
to aging regarding how individual life stories are entwined with the larger
cultural narratives in which literature also intervenes. In the chapter by
Suzanne Bailey, the concept of gerotranscendence travels in the opposite
direction, from gerontology to literary age studies. Gerotranscendence,
coined by gerontopsychologist Lars Tornstam, refers to subjectivity in
later life, characterized by a greater acceptance of the ups and downs
inherent to the life cycle, a new sense of connection to the past, and more
appreciation for community life. Bailey uses the term to examine different
configurations of older age as they appear in the writings of poets in the
later stages of their career, namely Margaret Avison’s Momentary Dark
(2006), published when she was 88, and some works from the
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
11
posthumous Last Poems (1939) by W. B. Yeats. These two chapters most
prominently employ gerontological concepts, which inform other contributions as well (e.g., Lipscomb).
Inspired by the genre of the “film noir,” Helen Small introduces the
literary category or imaginary of the “care noir” to designate disturbing
depictions of the care home as an abusive institution in which residents
suffer from the mistreatment of professional caregivers and the impersonality and rigidity of management structures. Her corpus includes Muriel
Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), Paul Bailey’s At the Jerusalem (1967), and
B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal (1971). She connects this corpus
from the late 1950s–1970s to Lionel Shriver’s 2021 novel Should We Stay
or Should We Go? In her chapter on Hiromi Goto’s novel Chorus of
Mushrooms (1994), Amelia DeFalco argues that the concept of the posthuman can enrich the study of aging and care, which are unavoidably
entwined because prejudice toward living with disability feeds into prejudice toward older age. In her view, the category of the human—often
understood as able-bodied, white, male, and heterosexual—has served as
a tool for exclusion and marginalization in both care theory and age studies. It conceals the more-than-human networks that bind humans and
non-humans together. DeFalco uses the image of mycorrhizal frameworks
of fungi as “material and metaphorical emblems of posthuman care.” She
shows how the novel Chorus of Mushrooms explores more-than-human
entanglements and opposes linear narratives through polyphonic narration, disorienting temporal play, and multisensory communication.
In a similar vein, Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako ask how the picturebooks Stardust (2017) by Jeanne Willis and Briony May Smith and Jiichan
no naisho no umi (Grandpa’s Secret Sea, 1993) by Toyomitsu Yamauchi
et al. establish a generational imaginary that introduces children to a
more-than-human sense of time. Generation is here both understood as
cohort-based thinking and as a broader kinship model that starts from
similarities between groups of people. In the context of environmental
crisis, Falcus and Sako argue, books can become powerful tools to make us
understand the more-than-­
human temporal scale that is necessary to
rethink our relations with human and non-human worlds. Reading the
English and Japanese texts in dialogue confronts unproductive child/
adult, human/non-human, and romantic/ecocritical binaries. In her contribution, Julia Henderson focuses on the interplay of theatrical time and
narratives of older age and intergenerationality. She compares the play
August: Osage County (2007) by Tracy Letts with 4000 Miles (2011) by
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
12
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
Amy Herzog through the concepts of temporal dissonance, thickness, and
materiality coined by theater critic Matthew D. Wagner. In Henderson’s
view, 4000 Miles offers a more positive and nuanced view of aging and
later life while promoting generational continuity compared to August:
Osage County, in which older female characters are held responsible for
dysfunction and conflict in the family. The chapter by Henderson is also
one of the examples in the Handbook that shows the importance of the
concept of performance—a quintessential traveling concept to which Bal
dedicates an entire section—from theater and performance studies (as well
as feminist theory) to age studies. Other examples include the chapters by
Casado-Gual and Lipscomb.
Part 3: Methodological Innovations
If, as we argue earlier, we no longer understand literary age studies exclusively as a form of “critique,” we must consider approaches to literature
aside from the close reading. While close reading continues to be a mainstay of literary criticism and is well represented in the first, second, and
fourth sections of the Handbook, the third part, “Methodological
Innovations,” highlights alternative tools for and routes into data collection (e.g., large, digitized corpora) and elicitation (e.g., transcribed focus
group interviews, creative writing exercises) as well as data analysis. We are
aware that this section challenges scholars of literature and aging to allow
the very definition of literary studies to expand, if not metamorphose, and
to move their focus from a specific literary text to literary practices and
what they do. We approach this “doing” from a literary rather than the
more usual, quantifiable therapeutic point of view. The innovation of
methodological approaches to study age in relation to literature is connected to the increasing desire to integrate the voices of older people
themselves in literary age-studies scholarship, opening up space for co-­
creation and future citizen science. The chapters in this part suggest newer
directions for the study of literature, where opportunities for experimentation and creativity abound.
The chapter by Vanessa Joosen demonstrates what the study of age in
children’s literature—usually understood as a tool for socialization—gains
by applying distant reading to study larger data sets and micro-level units
of analysis in addition to working with the typical smaller corpus from
which a few literary case studies are selected. Joosen illustrates how to
employ the digital tools of topic modeling and Scattertext to improve our
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
13
understanding of the construction of explicit and implicit age norms in a
corpus of 193 digitized and annotated Dutch, Flemish, and English texts
ranging from baby books to young-adult fiction published between 1970
and 2020. Such a huge enterprise requires teamwork, here conducted in
the framework of the Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR) project, funded by the European Research Council and run at the University
of Antwerp (2019–2024).
The Handbook includes two chapters that argue for the potential of
creative writing as a reflective practice for older lay people and literature
scholars alike. Oddgeir Synnes writes about the creative writing courses
that he organized for Norwegian older people. Creative writing is here
understood as a range of practices that foreground the productive and
performative aspects of language. Synnes’s chapter examines the aesthetic
characteristics of the literary texts created during the creative writing exercises. It also addresses what the texts do in existential terms: They help the
participants to see things anew through poetic language, support the revision of significant life events, serve as a potential therapeutic opening, and
stimulate the creative use of nostalgia. Synnes explicitly positions his contribution as an alternative to the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” His chapter
also redirects the debate on how the positive effects of arts approaches in
everyday settings should be measured—away from the quantitative, randomized control trials to qualitative, ethnographic evidence.
The chapter by Núria Casado-Gual is situated at the intersection of
research in theater, age studies, and creative writing, focusing on the experiences of the older actor. Creative writing is here inscribed in practice
research. First, Casado-Gual interviewed 12 Catalan actors between 60
and 70 years old about their professional experiences as aging actors as
well as their views on aging and how it is performed in contemporary theater. Second, from the resulting polyphonic responses, she created a realistic theater piece, “Scenes Towards a New Dramaturgy of Aging,” on
which she reflects in the chapter. The scenes show how an actress in her
mid-70s moves from individual reflections on aging on stage to a more
collective call for the development of a more age-inclusive theater. Casado-­
Gual’s mixed-methods approach serves not just as another way for the
scholar to critically reflect on aging in theater by incorporating the voices
of older actors themselves but also to create art that could impact the communal practice of theater making itself.
Furthermore, two chapters in this section feature projects in which
scholars collaborate with older lay readers. Emma Domínguez-Rué and
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
14
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
Maricel Oró-Piqueras explore the connection between wisdom, creativity, and quality of life in the responses of a Catalan reading group to
Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004) and
Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011). This reading group is part
the project Ageing, Quality of Life and Creativity through Narrative, in
which literary fiction is implemented as a means to study how readers
understand and give meaning to older age. The authors examine how
longtime readers interpret the presence or development of wisdom in fictional characters and whether that might contribute to quality of life in
older age. Co-editor of the Handbook Aagje Swinnen asks in her chapter
to what extent the participants in a Dutch reading and writing group resist
the rather negative portrayal of a mother living with early-onset Alzheimer’s
disease in the dementia narrative Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of
Hours (2011) by Flemish author Erwin Mortier. By analyzing the data
collected through reading diaries, a focus group discussion, and creative
writing exercises, she hopes to debunk the common notion that lay readers are naïve in their acceptance of the age ideologies in a text.
The chapter by Anita Wohlmann does not concentrate on the impact
of literary texts on readers per se but of figurative language in the tradition
of metaphor research. Within age studies, following the seminal work of,
for instance, Susan Sontag, the focus usually lies on the potentially harmful
impact of figurative language—such as the “silver tsunami,” the “living
dead,” and the “age-friendly city.” They convey clichéd assumptions about
aging and older age (some of which the readers in the chapter by Swinnen
opposed). But metaphors are also necessary heuristic devices and sources
of aesthetic pleasure. Inspired by Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s take on
“long possession” as a form of resistance to the fast-fashion cycles,
Wohlmann takes metaphor research a step further by approaching figurative language from the perspective of repair and recycling. By looking into
the metaphors of decline and winter in Roz Chast’s graphic memoir Can’t
We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (2014) and the metaphor of fight
in Philip Roth’s memoir Patrimony: A True Story (1991), she shows how
metaphors can be creatively used and reused to enable change.
Part 4: Archival Inquiries
In the fourth part of the handbook, we explore the archive of literary texts
that scholars work with historically. As Jacques Derrida argues, archive
(from the Greek arche, meaning govern, control, authorize) signals both
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
15
commencement (beginning) and commandment (order). An archive is a
locus of power and authority; it confronts boundary issues regarding what
is present versus what is absent. Building our archive—an imaginative
space—as scholars, we are also developing a canon of works to examine.
Canon formation is a never-ending process of in- and ex-clusion. We argue
that literary age studies should not only acknowledge this aspect of the
field more readily but also adopt it more explicitly as a subject of study.
Considering this aspiration, we ask ourselves to what extent our volume
contributes to diversifying the archive. Although all the historical literary
periods are represented, this section in some aspects reflects the state of
the field in that fewer critics specialize in age studies within medieval and
early modern literatures. A focus on aging has been burgeoning within
nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies but remains strongest in contemporary literature. We hope this volume encourages more scholars who
focus on earlier time periods to adopt an age-studies perspective.
The chapters in this section also reflect the wide range of textual genres
that literary scholars examine as they analyze representations of age from
the medieval period through today. As historian Antje Kampf writes,
“Sources are the Achilles’ heel of any historical contextualization of ageing” (49). There are (relatively) limited sources that account for the ordinary lives of older people from the past and, when available, the question
remains how to interpret them. Three chapters in particular incorporate
legends and life writing (letters, journals, et cetera), moving beyond the
more typical focus on fiction, poetry, and drama. Medievalist Harriet
Soper draws on the Old English verse hagiography Juliana and the
fifteenth-­century spiritual biography The Book of Margery Kempe, showing
how these works disrupt the normative stages of the life course known as
the Ages of Man. This masculinist and heteronormative conceptualization
of linear time was not the cultural monolith some scholars have made us
believe, Soper argues. Christopher Martin works with selected Early
Modern artifacts to exemplify the centuries-old mythic longing of human
beings to extend the life span that lives on in today’s ageist transhumanist
fantasies about curing the “disease of old age.” Martin’s sources include
references to fountain-of-youth legends, such as the famous painting
(1546) by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Juan Ponce de León’s discovery
of the mythical site as told in the Historia general y natural de las indias of
Gonzalo Fernández de Ovieda Valdés (1535). These are contrasted with
accounts of older age lifestyles such as the autobiography Discorsi Della
Vita Sobria by Paduan humanist Alvise Cornaro (1484–1566) and the
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
16
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
account of supercentenarian Thomas Parr as poeticized in John Taylor’s
The Old, Old, Very Old Man (1635). Martin juxtaposes the valorization of
youth in the fountain legends that already had little credibility in their own
time with the more upbeat outlook of a comfortable and vital life in the
supercentenarian narratives. Amy Culley’s chapter examines the journals
and letters of Frances Burney and the lesser-known letters of Catherine
Hutton—two nineteenth-century figures who continued writing into
their 80 s. Through these life writings, Burney and Hutton navigated the
cultural and social scripts for women in older age and formed their identities as widow, mother, sister, friend, and single woman. The writings of
both Burney and Hutton were edited by female relatives of the next generation. Culley shows how emotional intensity and physical detail got lost
in this editorial process to uphold Victorian ideals of female aging, embracing the values of gratitude, patience, and piety.
Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen note in their valuable introduction to Literature and Ageing that scholarship on the novel has dominated literary age studies. They explain this observation by referring to the
importance of the genre for the emergence of literary realism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which coincides with the emergence of
age as a distinct identity category and ever more pressing social concern
(4). We see, also, that this emergence helps account for the relatively scant
attention to age studies among literary scholars who work with pre-­
nineteenth-­century texts. Although this handbook reflects the disparity
among time periods, it departs from that generic dominance, as only six
chapters focus specifically on analyzing traditional novels. All other contributions cover different media and genres, ranging from children’s (Falcus
and Sako) and young adult literature (Hess and Ullmann; Joosen) to
graphic narratives (Garden and Lamb; Wohlmann). Melanie Dawson’s
inquiry into the archives, for instance, brings two short stories from modernist American writers into dialogue: Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button” (1922) and Faulkner’s “The Fire and the Hearth”
(1942). She addresses how familial relationships and age-specific orders
are imagined in these narrative constellations that depart in unique ways
from the ordinary. Turning to modern drama’s relationship to its ancient
origins, co-editor Valerie Barnes Lipscomb illuminates misreadings of
the senex figure in Desire under the Elms (1924) by Eugene O’Neill. While
critics rely heavily on stock-character traits that assume the older protagonist’s age-related impotence, she argues that he demonstrates unflagging
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
17
virility. Applying continuity theory, Lipscomb claims that the play resists
ageist cultural attitudes.
Heike Hartung as well as Nicklas Freisleben Lund and Peter
Simonsen dedicate their chapters to the medium of poetry. Hartung’s
analysis of the twentieth-century grief poetry of Thomas Hardy (Poems of
1912–13, 1914) and Ted Hughes (Birthday Letters, 1998) facilitates the
rethinking of the notion of late style. She presents a conceptualization of
late style that unites the opposing positions—conflict and rupture on the
one hand and continuity and serenity on the other—that characterize
most theories of late style. Hartung also introduces a gender perspective
to clarify the poets’ different grieving responses to the passing of their
spouses. Lund and Simonsen study a contemporary Scandinavian archive
of “gerontological poetry”: poems from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
that thematize aging into older age as experienced by the lyrical I. The
contributors conclude that the welfare-state project to secure the well-­
being of older citizens by providing state-financed or subsidized pensions
and services does not eliminate existential anxieties that may come with
older age. On the contrary, it may have intensified them by changing the
expectations of quality of life in older age. While differing in approach,
these chapters join Suzanne Bailey’s in examining how modern and contemporary poems limn older ages.
Several of the chapters in this section examine works by canonical
authors such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hardy, Hughes, and O’Neill. Still,
the approaches to these works are often novel. In that vein, Alice Crossley’s
chapter focuses on well-known works of Anthony Trollope (The Warden,
1855, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867) and Charles Dickens (Great
Expectations, 1861). By analyzing depictions of aging masculinities,
Crossley shows how the older male characters depart from hegemonic
masculinity scripts and occupy positions of emotional power that facilitate
the negotiation of status and relational authority. This renegotiation favors
connectivity, supportive kinship, and emotional responsiveness. Of note is
that not only Crossley’s chapter but also the contributions by Lipscomb
and Hartung focus on the intersections of aging, gender, and masculinity,
aligning with the importance of intersectional perspectives foregrounded
in the first section of the Handbook.
Despite a recognition of the need for greater diversity, the archive that
age-studies scholars investigate continues to center on white, middle-class
authors who write about their own demographic, as Lund and Simonsen
so aptly observe in their chapter on Scandinavian gerontological poetry.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
18
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
This situation is (too) slowly beginning to change in relation to the historical archive. In this section, Jacob Jewusiak applies a postcolonial lens
to the scholarly and political writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, the first British
Indian MP and founding member of the Indian National Congress.
Jewusiak’s chapter reframes the positioning of the empire as a paternalistic
disciplinarian to its childlike colonial subjects in postcolonial criticism.
Naoroji presents national senescent exhaustion as the result of colonial
policy and calls for the empire to care for the quality of life of Indians as
one would for an older relative.
The previous section on Methodological Innovations includes Joosen’s
chapter on computational criticism that is based on a much larger corpus
of literary texts that were digitized to facilitate different types of distant
reading. (Within literary studies, Franco Moretti and others advocate this
type of approach, but it has not yet resulted in a profound shift in the
practice of literary studies, which still is most often based on close readings
of one to three literary works.) We also include chapters in which the primary material under study is not literary in the narrowest sense but, for
instance, entails reader responses or creative writing by lay people. In this
part, Archival Inquiries, texts are also understood in a broad sense ranging
from life writing to non-fiction. In sum, we advocate for and sought to
practice a more inclusive understanding of the archive of literary age
studies.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a foundational scholar of age studies,
closes out the Handbook with a chapter that touches on several of the
concerns and aims of the volume as a whole. She challenges the definition
of a literary text by examining comics and birthday cards, foregrounding
genres that reach mass audiences. Gullette points out how these works
participate in, construct, and sometimes resist the ageism—micro and
macro—of Western societies. And as always, her sui generis scholarship
inspires literary critics to seek new avenues for analyzing age and combating ageism. We believe it is fitting to conclude the Handbook with that
clarion call.
Looking Forward
We intend that this handbook will be useful to scholars in literary studies,
aging studies, and related fields, that it will welcome students into the
scholarly conversation now and for years ahead. As we aim to provide a
panoramic view of the field today, we acknowledge that readers are more
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
19
likely to attend to individual parts or chapters than to commit to 200,000
words cover to cover. Each chapter stands alone but is designed to contribute to the part and to the volume as a whole. Therefore, we hope to
pique readers’ curiosity to venture outside their specialized interests, to
explore work that is under way in a different genre, a different time period,
a different methodology. Long after the humanities and social sciences
took seemingly different paths, we anticipate new strands of scholarly conversation developing from the juxtaposition of traditional literary analyses
with qualitative studies. What can we learn from each other’s current practices? What gaps in the discourse might we discover and fill? For example,
we offer the reading-group inquiries partly to question the long-standing
assumption that literature is best illuminated by “expert” critics, but we
recognize that the groups studied in this handbook all focus on older
readers. What might be revealed by conducting such inquiries with groups
of younger readers (adolescents, younger adults, “middle-aged” adults)
who engage with literature about older characters? We encourage fellow
age-studies scholars to progress toward the goal of addressing the entire
life course. Similarly, while we celebrate that scholars of earlier time periods are now building a body of work in literary age studies, how can critics
of later periods be in conversation with that work? Modern and contemporary scholars now have greater opportunities than ever to situate their
analyses historically within age studies. Collaboration will be key to capitalizing on those opportunities.
As literary age studies continues to confront the humanistic question of
what it means to grow older, one conclusion is clear: The field is thriving,
still with abundant room to grow. We eagerly look forward to the next
chapters.
Acknowledgments A project spanning multiple years and two continents involves
the expertise, dedication, and hard work of numerous professionals. But this particular project also spanned a global pandemic, so we are extraordinarily grateful
for the perseverance and grace of everyone who worked on the Handbook while
dealing with the often overwhelming personal and professional stresses that
accompanied the proliferation of COVID-19.
Thanks are due to the publishers, editors, and production staff at Palgrave
Macmillan, who have been unflagging in their enthusiasm for this volume. We
thank the formal peer reviewers as well as our colleagues who informally helped us
conceive the Handbook.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
20
V. B. LIPSCOMB AND A. SWINNEN
We thank all of our contributors, who have remained steadfastly committed to
ensuring that this book will advance the field. We appreciate not only your talents
but also your collaborative spirit.
We express gratitude to our communities at the University of South Florida
(USF) and Maastricht University for their support of our efforts.
Thank you to Madison Touchton, our editorial assistant, for outstanding competence, precision, and reliability.
Valerie acknowledges a research award from USF Women in Leadership and
Philanthropy to support completion of this volume.
And our deepest gratitude flows to our loved ones—especially Kevin, Vanessa,
Natalie, and Georgi—for their constant encouragement in all our professional
endeavors.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. U of
Toronto P, 2002.
Barry, Elizabeth, and Margery Vibe Skagen, editors. Literature and Ageing.
Boydell & Brewer, 2020. Essays and Studies 73.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Calasanti, Toni, and Sadie Giles. “The Challenge of Intersectionality.” Generations
Journal, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 69–74.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, 1989,
pp. 139–167.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric
Prenowitz, U of Chicago P, 1996.
Dressel, Paula, et al. “Gender, Race, Class, and Aging: Advances and Opportunities.”
International Journal of Health Services, vol. 27, no. 4, 1997, pp. 579–600.
Falcus, Sarah. “Literature and Ageing.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural
Gerontology, edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, Routledge, 2015,
pp. 53–60.
Green, Jesse. “50 Years In, Happily Ever After Is a Joke.” New York Times, 24 Jan.
2020, p. C1(L). Gale Academic OneFile.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture, U of Chicago P, 2004.
Hess, Linda. Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave, 2019.
Jewusiak, Jacob. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from
Dickens to Woolf. Cambridge UP, 2020.
Kampf, Antje. “Historians of Ageing and the ‘Cultural Turn.’” Routledge
Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin,
Routledge, 2015, pp. 45–52.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
1
INTRODUCTION: A SMORGASBORD FOR LITERATURE LOVERS IN SEARCH…
21
Looser, Devoney. “Age and Aging Studies, from Cradle to Grave.” Age, Culture,
Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 25–29, https://
doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v1i.129938.
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.
Oh, June, et al. “Contested Language and the Study of Later Life.” Age, Culture,
Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6, 2022, https://doi.
org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v6i.133353.
Small, Helen. “Response to the Contested Language Forum.” Age, Culture,
Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6, 2023, https://tidsskrift.dk/
ageculturehumanities/.
Swinnen, Aagje. “Towards a Postcritical Turn in Literary Aging Studies? Older
Women’s Responses to Dimitri Verhulst’s Novella Madame Verona Comes
Down the Hill.” Forms of Aging, special issue of Poetics Today, edited by Jacob
Jewusiak, 2023.
Swinnen, Aagje, and Cynthia Port. “Aging, Narrative, and Performance: Essays
from the Humanities.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, vol. 7,
no. 2, 2012, pp. 9–15, https://doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-­8670.1272a1.
Swinnen, Aagje, et al. “Exploring the Boundaries of Literary Age Studies.” Frame:
Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2017, pp. 19–30.
Waxman, Barbara Frey. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of
Aging in Contemporary Literature. Greenwood P, 1990.
Wohl, Bess. Grand Horizons. Dramatists Play Service, 2021.
Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions.
Indiana UP, 1991.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne. “The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology.” Journal of
Aging Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 1990, pp. 229–315.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
PART I
Intersections and Intersectionalities
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters
Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download.
Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at
etutorsource@gmail.com
You can also order by WhatsApp
https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph
one_number&app_absent=0
Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and
Author Name.