Search

Age is a cultural entity like race, class, and gender that must be explored deeply. The increase in the aged population all over the world by 2050 will promote serious inquiry in the field of gerontology. The issues of the aged, like ageism, old age abuse, and negative age stereotypes, need age appropriateness, the individual: physical and psychological and the social, political, and economic aspects of ageing need to be analysed to understand the phenomenon comprehensively. This study must be promoted in the postmodern, industrial, and globalised world. The central focus gerontologists and gerontological theories insist on is successful, positive, and happy ageing. Gerontological ideas review the place of older people in society, reinvent positive images of ageing, and stand for perpetuating the images. Many gerontological inquiries conclude that an individual's ageing experience is influenced by society's standards and attitude towards older people. Literature is taken as a resource to comprehend the individual experience of ageing. Gerontologists suggest attaching some goals during the later stage to gain a positive outlook on the last stage of life. This will promote successful ageing. The paper tries to explain the scope of ageing studies in the literature, identifying literary gerontology as a promising field in health sciences that will delve deep into age and ageing, and satisfy the ideals mentioned earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent decades have witnessed the coming of age of ‘literary gerontology’, a discipline situated at the intersection of literary studies and gerontology. A key argument of this research is that literature and literary criticism can highlight the complexities and ambiguities of age, ageing and later life. As such, the discipline insists on the relevance of literature within the field of gerontology. This study explores this claim from an interdisciplinary perspective and presents the key findings of an exploratory collaboration between researchers representing literature studies, anthropology, history, public health and medicine. The members of the research team took part in a joint reading, analysis and discussion of Danish author Ane Riel’s novel, Clockwork, which depicts an ageing protagonist’s reconcilement with old age and death. These efforts resulted in dual dimensions of insight: a realistic dimension, which may be interpreted as a confirmation of the existing knowledge of ageing and wellbeing, characterized by physical and cognitive challenges; and an imaginary dimension, a type of knowledge distilled in the interaction between the reader and the literary work. The reader can be seen to be tasked with identifying with the protagonist, with this process providing a hitherto unknown perspective on how ageing is experienced, how it feels and what it means. The study exemplifies an approach fostering cross-disciplinary inspiration, which may stimulate novel research hypotheses and ultimately inform public health thinking and medical practice.

Women's ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women's experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women. This article aims to acknowledge the existence of the Reifungsroman in Australian literature while addressing questions around how this genre is employed in the Australian context, in order to actively engage with the topic of women's ageing. Drawing on literary gerontology, this article examines Australian novelist Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection (2000) and Dorothy Hewett's Neap Tide (1999) from a feminist perspective, focusing on the literary representations of ageing women offered by these novels. In so doing, this article contends that the Australian Reifungsroman unsettles the dominant ideas about women's ageing as negative and declining. Indeed, narratives such as these help to articulate ageing women's agency by reconstructing new images of older womanhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed the coming of age of 'literary gerontology', a discipline situated at the intersection of literary studies and gerontology. A key argument of this research is that literature and literary criticism can highlight the complexities and ambiguities of age, ageing and later life. As such, the discipline insists on the relevance of literature within the field of gerontology. This study explores this claim from an interdisciplinary perspective and presents the key findings of an exploratory collaboration between researchers representing literature studies, anthropology, history, public health and medicine. The members of the research team took part in a joint reading, analysis and discussion of Danish author Ane Riel's novel, Clockwork, which depicts an ageing protagonist's reconcilement with old age and death. These efforts resulted in dual dimensions of insight: a realistic dimension, which may be interpreted as a confirmation of the existing knowledge of ageing and wellbeing, characterized by physical and cognitive challenges; and an imaginary dimension, a type of knowledge distilled in the interaction between the reader and the literary work. The reader can be seen to be tasked with identifying with the protagonist, with this process providing a hitherto unknown perspective on how ageing is experienced, how it feels and what it means. The study exemplifies an approach fostering cross-disciplinary inspiration, which may stimulate novel research hypotheses and ultimately inform public health thinking and medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old age is perceived as a narrative of decline, recently, an alternative perspective was introduced known as positive aging or Gerotranscendance. This paper examines ageing in Bryony Lavery's A Wedding Story (2000) and Sebastian Barry's Hinterland (2002) through the theory of gerontology. Gerontology in British and Irish modern theatre, according to Giovanna Tallone (2020) and Heather Ingman (2018), is a new category in literary studies and theory. The paper aims to examine the challenges of retaining agency in old age in comparison to the notion of aging as a process of inner harmony further proving that despite the process of ageing being an individualised experience, the commonalities of growing old are universal as depicted in Lavery's and Barry's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyses the fictional representation of ageing, dementia and migrant home care in Ireland in Oona Frawley's debut novel Flight (2014) and how the tropes of in/difference and silence best befit this representation. Drawing upon the tenets of literary gerontology and the Irish perspectives on ageing and dementia the analysis focuses on the multiple individual and community challenges the novel depicts – those of patients' and onlookers' perspectives, the fourth age and demise. Accordingly, the novel becomes the site of denunciation and interrogation of social and institutional responses to ageing and migrant home care. The analysis concludes that Frawley's fiction represents the potential of individual stories of ageing and care to envisage new futures within a global Irish society that is constantly changing. Ultimately, these stories are directly related to a wider social, historical, economic and political context in contemporary Ireland that enforces silence and in/difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fictional representations of dementia have burgeoned in recent years, and scholars have amply explored their double-edged capacity to promote tragic perspectives or normalising images of 'living well' with the condition. Yet to date, there has been only sparse consideration of the treatment afforded dementia within the genre of crime fiction. Focusing on two novels, Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing and Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind, this article considers what it means in relation to the ethics of representation that these authors choose to cast as their amateur detective narrators women who have dementia. Analysing how their narrative portrayals frame the experience of living with dementia, it becomes apparent that features of the crime genre inflect the meanings conveyed. While aspects of the novels may reinforce problem-based discourses around dementia, in other respects they may spur meaningful reflection about it among the large readership of this genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the article is to provide an extended definition and in-depth description of literary gerontology as a branch of humanities. Contemporary world witnesses how the number of elderly people increases that makes the research relevant. Literary gerontology forms in the mid-1970s in the framework of age studies. Scholars of literary gerontology examine the gerontological markers in fictional texts. Unlike sociologists or medical gerontologists who regard biological aging as involution of the body/brain and degradation of the individual, the literary scholars consider fictional representations of late adulthood in a much more contrastive and tragic focus: elderly people are forced to deal with numerous negative stereotypes of old age in a youth-oriented culture. Therefore the key concept of literary gerontology studies is ageism which etymology is traced in the lexical unit of “age”. Its initial meaning “lifetime; maturity; vital force” is lost over time, acquiring the connotation of “decline” (feebleness; senility). One of the problems of literary gerontology studies is the widespread use of ageist euphemisms in fiction. The methods used in the paper are mixed: historical data processing, analyses of interdisciplinary resources (literary gerontology, social gerontology, age studies). The results can be practical for classes of theory of literature and social gerontology. The findings of the paper inform of the origin of literary gerontolog DOI: https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2475.2019.133

Background and Objectives Associations of young-old age with successful aging have contributed to relegating negatively perceived aspects of aging to very old age. This has prompted the formation of the social imaginary of the fourth age. Re-examinations of the fourth age foreground the diversity of aging experiences among the oldest old. In this sense, literature is in a privileged position to contribute individual narratives of aging to this field. The main aim of this article is to analyze Irish writer Jennifer Johnston's later fiction and how particularly two of her later fictional works contribute a nuanced re-examination of the fourth age through the narrativization of individual aging experiences of the oldest old in the contemporary Irish context. Research Design and Methods The work of sociologists and social theorists on re-examinations of the fourth age functions as the framework to analyze the selected fictional texts. Results The analysis of the oldest old characters in Truth or Fiction and Naming the Stars shows the contribution of literary texts to rethinking the fourth age as a time characterized by the inextricable combination of gains and losses, with emphasis on the diversity of the aging experiences of the oldest old and on the importance of sociocultural influence on individual aging. Discussion and Implications Combining longitudinal analyses with case studies, such as the ones suggested by these fictional texts, can provide a more accurate knowledge of the experience of advanced old age and the fourth age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jane West's late life and writings show a self-consciousness about authorship and a strong perspective on literary value and fame in old age. This essay shows how such a consciousness is revealed in a private letter, her last novel, Ringrove (1827), and her detail-filled will. West's late-life self-conception in a private letter as an 'old Q in the corner' deserves to be examined as a metaphor for the ageing female author. Taken together, these three texts demonstrate how West tries to shape readers' responses to old women as writers, using self-deprecating humour as a response to perceived neglect. The results are hardly comic, but they give us the opportunity to examine how a self-consciously older woman puts her words before a mass readership that was not necessarily well disposed to receive them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the methodologies of the field of the humanities, the international field of ageing studies has demonstrated the important role that narrative practice exercises on older people's quality of life. Psychological and sociological research also shows that the image and representation that an individual has of him/herself and of the social group to which s/he belongs, as well as his/her conceptual and linguistic construction, have a direct influence on their ageing process. This article relates both aspects based on the author Rosa Fabregat (born in 1933), who acts as a case study in two ways. On the one hand, the study intends to demonstrate that narratives written by older women play an exemplary and pedagogical role in helping counteract negative stereotypes of gender and age. On the other hand, the essay applies critical discourse analysis to semi-structured interviews with the writer, as well as to the fifty volumes the author has published to date. The general objective is to analyze the alternative "narrative of age" that is derived from her biography and oeuvre, a narrative that is imbued with her own life experience and written from a feminist angle. In a more specific way, the article takes into account the sociolinguistic and characterological construction of her characters and pays special attention to ageing female figures, as well as to the situations in which they find themselves, and how they have an impact on them or behave within them. Besides analyzing the literary universe of the author through the lens of ageing studies, the article looks at the positive role that the process of literary creation exerts in the author's perception of her own old age, thus connecting her literary creativity with her own aging process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New biomedicalized forms of longevity, anti-aging ideals, and the focus on successful aging have permeated the current sociocultural and political climate, and will affect the future of aging. This article examines changing attitudes towards sexual practices and the perception of sexuality in later years, as exemplified in Erica Jong's middle and late life works and interviews. Instead of succumbing to anti-aging culture and biomedicalization of sex in old age, Jong reveals alternative ways of exploring sexual practices in older age, and challenges a pharmaceutical market that promotes the consumption of medication to enhance the idea of virility and 'sexual fitness' in older men. Jong''s work undoes the narrative of decline that portrays older individuals as sexually inactive and frail, and, at the same time, shows that the interest in sexual intercourse and the erect phallus gradually becomes less important as people grow older. This qualitative narrative analysis opens the discussion for reconsideration of late-life sexuality beyond biomedical understandings of late-life sex and old age. The study also reveals how a literary approach can provide alterative and more realistic perspectives towards sexual experiences in later stages of life that can have significant implications for healthcare policy and the future of aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penelope Lively is a well-known contemporary British author who has published a good number of novels and short stories since she started her literary career in her late thirties. In her novels, Lively looks at the lives of contemporary characters moulded by specific historical as well as cultural circumstances. Four of her novels, published from1987 to 2004, presentmiddle-aged and older women as their main protagonists. Through the voices and thoughts of these female characters, the reader is presentedwith amultiplicity of realities inwhichwomen find themselves after their mid-fiftieswithin a contemporary context. Being a woman and entering into old age is a double-sided jeopardy which has increasingly been present in contemporary fiction. Scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Susan Sontag (1972) were among the first to point out a "double standard of aging" when they assured that women were punished when showing external signs of aging much sooner than men. In Lively's four novels, the aging protagonists present their own stories and, through them, as well as through the voices of those around them, the reader is invited to go beyond the aging appearance of the female protagonists while challenging the limiting conceptions attached to the old body and, by extension, to the social and cultural overtones associated with old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely accepted that ’’age’’ and ’’ageing’’ are cultural concepts that are open to question. The thinking encouraged by critical gerontology has been crucially important in provoking questions about the complexities of later life, age and ageing. Similarly, the interrogation of stories of age and ageing via narrative approaches and as found in literature are increasingly recognised as an important source of knowledge for mining the intricacies of later life. There are close links between the interests of critical gerontologists and those who engage in narrative and literary gerontology. However, the potential that critical gerontology has for illuminating and probing these stories of age has often been neglected. The central argument of this article is that narrative and literary approaches to age and ageing when allied to perspectives from critical gerontology can furnish scholars with important perspectives for interpreting and re-configuring ’’age’’. The focus is upon how a genuinely dialogic relationship between critical gerontology and narrative and literary gerontology can be forged. In this way, the full potential of these stories of ageing; their epistemological status for enriching theoretical work on ageing, might be better exploited.

Abstract: This article broaches the topic of biogerontology as presented in Gary Shteyngart''s dystopic novel Super Sad True Love Story(2010) from the perspective of cultural and literary gerontology and examines how the novel manages to challenge predominant discourses in the field of scientific anti-aging studies, especially the notion that old age is a disease that can be cured. It compares the novel''s presentation of biogerontological knowledge to current developments in the field, using Cambridge biogerontologist and immortality prophet Aubrey de Grey''s book Ending Aging(2007) as an example. Based on the assumption that cultural criticism can and should impact scientific and medical research on aging, this paper asks whether (the analysis of) fictional texts can be seen as a cultural critical intervention into the ageism so often openly displayed in scientific discourses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Within the growing body of interdisciplinary work on ageing, more attention is now paid to literary engagement with and representations of ageing, often in the form of literary gerontology. This field locates literature as part of the cultural discourses around ageing in our society. Pat Barker's work, already the subject of some gerontological attention, is important here, because her texts offer detailed representations of the ageing subject, and engage with the often disturbing challenges that ageing presents to self and social identity. This paper considers three of Pat Barker's novels –Another World (1999), Liza's England (1986/1996), and Union Street (1982) – within one of the central debates in ageing studies: how far we are aged by culture and where culture might meet the material. In these novels, ageing characters are clearly at the mercy of cultural constructions of age; nevertheless, the texts also insist on the centrality of the body, forcefully reminding us of the limits of cultural ageing. This paper argues that these novels explore the interplay between cultural and corporeal ageing, forcing the reader to acknowledge the complexities of, and unsettle any easy assumptions about, ageing subjectivity. In the process, this suggests that what fiction can offer to gerontology is, at least in part, an exploration of the ineluctability of ‘contradictions’ when it comes to ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is now widely accepted that ''age'' and ''ageing'' are cultural concepts that are open to question. The thinking encouraged by critical gerontology has been crucially important in provoking questions about the complexities of later life, age and ageing. Similarly, the interrogation of stories of age and ageing via narrative approaches and as found in literature are increasingly recognised as an important source of knowledge for mining the intricacies of later life. There are close links between the interests of critical gerontologists and those who engage in narrative and literary gerontology. However, the potential that critical gerontology has for illuminating and probing these stories of age has often been neglected. The central argument of this article is that narrative and literary approaches to age and ageing when allied to perspectives from critical gerontology can furnish scholars with important perspectives for interpreting and re-configuring ''age''. The focus is upon how a genuinely dialogic relationship between critical gerontology and narrative and literary gerontology can be forged. In this way, the full potential of these stories of ageing; their epistemological status for enriching theoretical work on ageing, might be better exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American cultural narrative of personal identity has been formative of the study of American literature. Since the mid-1970s, the prototypical American male protagonist with his quest for self as a rebel against societal pressure has been supplemented by the female hero. I want to introduce the old woman as a paradigm of American culture, as aging - in contrast to stereotypical notions - does not bring a loss of identity, but emphasizes difference instead of communality, and expresses individualism more prominently than in youth. As a method to trace the aspect of aging as a cultural category and to generate what it means - in Margaret Morganroth Gullette's term - to be "aged by culture," I suggest an anocritical reading. By linking theories of gender and age, I propose a search for the specific female culture of aging in the tradition of Elaine Showalter's "gynocriticism" and have coined the term "anocriticism" for the recognition of the implicit meaning of aging. In this essay, I will demonstrate such a reading using Alison Moore's short story "Aperture." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary texts are cultural artifacts revealing a society's values and attitudes; reading literature about elders and old age can change readers' ageist attitudes. Beginning with these assumptions, I discuss ways of teaching cross-cultural aging in undergraduate literature courses, using Chilean texts paired with American texts. Students learn how old age is socially constructed and how writers can either reinforce or challenge negative societal stereotypes of elders. Chilean texts reveal Chileans' respect and affection by associating elders with nature and ascribing to them otherworldly wisdom. American texts respectfully depict elders connected to nature, but not as transcending the earthly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simone de Beauvoir's study on age and aging can be read as an example of feminist scholarship presenting the contradictions and the ambivalence inherent in any topic dealing with women and society. Beauvoir's work both applauded and criticized by feminist scholars offers an important document for addressing the double discrimination based on gender and age, and has been influential in defining a feminist approach to the discussion of gender and age. With the graying of American feminists in the 1990s, age became a concern and Beauvoir's contribution to the area of age studies received recognition as an early contribution to the humanist exploration of the topic of aging. This article surveys interpretations of Beauvoir's work on aging by literary critics, feminist historians, and a gerontologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a fresh examination of Mitch Albom's bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) from a perspective of literary age studies, with a special focus on the concept of later-life mentorship. The classic mentor figure, commonly seen as the archetype of a wise old teacher, is revived through the healing power of an end-of-life narrative. The mentorial relationship between a young man and an old man shows that the personal growth is as an ongoing and ageless process of becoming that can lead to wisdom and a better understanding of aging and living-with-dying. It also reveals that later-life narratives of mentorship are an integral part of the transmission of knowledge and humanistic values to establish solid relationships between generations. Life lessons with Morrie, collected in the form of a memoir, provide readers with important tools to learn to accept life in all its dimensions, and show how literary narratives of growing older can help deconstruct negative western notions of old age and lead to more meaningful lives in all life stages. • The classic mentor figure is central to the scholarship of age studies and related disciplines. • Cultural and literary narratives of growing older help deconstruct the negative notions of aging and old age. • Meaningful learning and personal growth is as an ongoing process of becoming that leads to wisdom in a holistic sense. • Wisdom stories are ageless journeys through life that imply the capacity of introspection and retrospection. • Later-life narratives of mentorship help transmit knowledge and humanistic values, and establish intergenerational relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]