Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

This book focuses on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, including shifting perceptions of physical and sexual prowess, depression, and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, as well as new affective patterns. The collection also incorporates factors such as race, sexuality and religion. The volume includes studies, amongst others, on Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Edmund White. Ultimately, this study proves that men's aging experiences as described in contemporary U.S. literature and culture are as complex and varied as those of their female counterparts.

Illustrates how social notions of masculinity not only affect their cultural representations, but also how such representations may, and indeed do, effect social change, providing alternative models of aging masculinities that challenge social prejudices of the same Draws upon both an interdisciplinary and intersectional methodology, examining not only the interrelationship of age and gender, as well as aging and gender studies, but also cultural variations by factors like race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religious affiliation Questions the widely held assumption that aging is less of an issue for men through close readings of contemporary works

Autorentext

Josep M. Armengol is Professor of U.S. Literature and Gender Studies at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He is the author of Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African) American Literature (2014), among others, and is Director of the project 'No Country for Old Men? Representations of Masculinity and Aging in Contemporary U.S. Fiction'.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Josep M. Armengol: No Country for Old Men? An Introduction.- Part I. GENDERING AGE.- Chapter 2. Juan González-Echeverría: Harvest Time for John Updike's Rabbit: Sex Dies Harder than Gender.- Chapter 3. Sarah Hardy: Geographies of Aging in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Third and Final Continent and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.- Chapter 4. Teresa Requena: Literary Representations of Aging Masculinities: Bodies and Privilege.- Part II. MEN'S AGING IN POPULAR FICTION.- Chapter 5. M. Isabel Santaulària I Capdevila: You are all too old to do anything but get yourselves killed: Age and Masculinity in Stephen King's It, Dreamcatcher and Doctor Sleep.- Chapter 6. Ángel Mateos-Aparicio: ''To Oldie Go: From James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard to Samuel Lord and the Reconstruction of the Aging Male Body in the Final Frontier.- Part III. OLDER MEN IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR.- Chapter 7. Esther Zaplana: Self-Representation 'Between Two': Ageing Males, and the 'Otherness within' in Philip Roth's Patrimony.- Chapter 8. Leonor Acosta-Bustamante: Reconstructing the (Masculine) Self from Old Age: Memories of the Aching Male Body in Paul Auster's Winter Journal.- Part IV. AGING BEYOND WHITENESS.- Chapter 9. Mar Gallego: Black Masculinities and Aging in Toni Morrison's Novels.- Chapter 10. Marta Bosch-Vilarrubias: Aging Men in Contemporary Arab American Literature Written by Women.- Part V. QUEERING AGE.- Chapter 11. Josep M. Armengol: Sex and Text: Queering Older Men's Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.- Chapter 12. Ignacio Ramos-Gay & Claudia Alonso-Recarte: On Long-lasting 'Humanimal' Companionships: Gayness, Aging and Disease in Steven Rowley's Lily and the Octopus