The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging

This handbook offers a comprehensive survey of the growing field of literary age studies and points to new directions in scholarly research. Divided into four sections, the volume reflects the current conversations in the field: intersections and intersectionalities, traveling concepts, methodological innovations, and archival inquiries. It encompasses the spectrum of critical approaches that literary age studies scholars employ, from environmental studies and postcolonial theory to critical race theory and queer studies. While close reading continues to be a mainstay of literary criticism, the handbook highlights alternative tools and routes in both data elicitation and analysis. The final part of the book shows the burgeoning interest in the field from literary scholars across historical periods, extending the scope of literary age studies beyond contemporary texts. This is an essential reference work for advanced students and scholars of literary studies, gerontology, age/aging studies, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.

Surveys the growing field of literary age studies Explores intersections and intersectionalities, traveling concepts, methodological innovations and archival inquiries Encourages further research on age, aging and ageism in literary works and literary practices across historical periods,

Autorentext

Valerie Barnes Lipscomb is Professor of English at the University of South Florida, USA. She is author of Performing Age in Modern Drama (2016) and lead editor of Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film (2010). Lipscomb's articles on age and drama have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, the Journal of Aging Studies, the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, and Age, Culture, Humanities. She also regularly presents papers at international and national conferences on literature, theatre, and age studies. Lipscomb has chaired the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association Age Studies Forum and is Treasurer of the North American Network in Aging Studies.

Aagje Swinnen is Professor of Aging Studies at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her co-edited volumes in English include Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle; Engaged Humanities; Popularizing Dementia; and Aging, Performance, and Stardom. She has published on representations of age and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and disability in literature, photography, and film; meanings of literary interventions in dementia care; and ways in which professional artists understand creativity in the later stages of their career in journals such as the Journal of Aging Studies, The Gerontologist, Dementia, Ageing & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. Swinnen is co-founder and former chair of the European Network in Aging Studies as well as co-editor of the open access journal Age, Culture, Humanities. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Aging Studies and Dementia.

Inhalt
1: A Smorgasbord for Literature Lovers in Search of More Age-Just Futures.- 2: Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging.- 3: Visibility of Older Black Women in Literature: Female Ancestors in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow .- 4: Magical Realism and Older Age: García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende's The Japanese Lover.- 5: Literacy Narratives and Age Identity across the Life Span.- 6: Revising the Dementia Imaginary: Disability and Age-Studies Perspectives on Graphic Narratives of Dementia.- 7: Queer Theory and Narrating Age Outside the Norm of (Re-)Productive Adulthood.- 8: Growing Older without Children: Challenging the (Re)Production Narrative for Older Women.- 9: Gerotranscendence as Literary Theory: Reading the Later Poems of Margaret Avison and W. B. Yeats.- 10: Care Noir : Before and After COVID.- 11: From Mushroom Men to Mycorrhizal Relations: Imagining Posthuman Aging and Care.- 11: Intergenerationality, Age, and Environment in Children's Picturebooks.- 12: Age in Contemporary Drama and Performance: The Value of Considering Theatrical Time.- 13: Constructing 'Old' Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach.- 14: Finding the Right Wor(l)ds: Creative Writing as Aesthetic and Existential Practice in Later Life.- 15: Creative Explorations for the Theatrical 'Age Turn': Toward a New Dramaturgy of Older Age.- 16: (Re)Interpreting Aging by Reading: Creativity, Wisdom, and Quality of Life in Older Age.- 17: Reading as Caring: Older Lay Readers' Responses to the Dementia Narrative Stammered Songbook.- 18 : Age and Its Metaphors.- 19: Age Identity in Old and Middle English Literature.- 20: Fantasies of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture.- 21: A Female, & Past 60 years of Age!: Older Age in Women's Later Life Writing 1800-1850.- 22: American Modernity and the Narrative Arcs of Aging.- 23: Sex and the Senex : The Weight of Tradition in Desire under the Elms.- 24: Grief Representation in Late Poetry: Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 and Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters.- 25: Gerontological Poetry of the Scandinavian Welfare State.- 26: Affirmations of Aging Masculinity in Victorian Fiction: Older Men at the Margins.- 27: Aging and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies.- 28: Are Older People Still Human? On Ageist Humor.