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

Drawing on sixteenth- to twenty-first-century American, British, French, German, Polish, Norwegian and Russian literature and philosophy, this collection teases out culturally specific conceptions of old age as well as subjective constructions of late-life identity and selfhood. The internationally known humanistic gerontologist Jan Baars, the prominent historian of old age David Troyansky and the distinguished cultural historian and pioneer in the field of literature and science George Rousseau join a team of literary historians who trace out the interfaces between their chosen texts and the respective periods' medical and gerontological knowledge. The chapters' in-depth analyses of major and less-known works demonstrate the rich potential of fiction, poetry and autobiographical writing in the construction of a cultural history of senescence. These literary examples not only bear witness to longue duree representations of old age, and epochal transitions regarding cultural attitudes to the aged; they also foreground the subjectivities that produced some of these representations and that continue to communicate with readers of other times and places. By casting a net over a variety of authors, genres, periods and languages, the collection gives a broad sense of how literature is among the richest and most engaging sources for historicizing the ageing self.

Drawing on sixteenth- to twenty-first-century American, British, French, German, Polish, Norwegian and Russian literature and philosophy, this collection teases out culturally specific conceptions of old age as well as subjective constructions of late-life identity and selfhood. The internationally known humanistic gerontologist Jan Baars, the prominent historian of old age David Troyansky and the distinguished cultural historian and pioneer in the field of literature and science George Rousseau join a team of literary historians who trace out the interfaces between their chosen texts and the respective periods' medical and gerontological knowledge. The chapters' in-depth analyses of major and less-known works demonstrate the rich potential of fiction, poetry and autobiographical writing in the construction of a cultural history of senescence. These literary examples not only bear witness to longue duree representations of old age, and epochal transitions regarding cultural attitudes to the aged; they also foreground the subjectivities that produced some of these representations and that continue to communicate with readers of other times and places. By casting a net over a variety of authors, genres, periods and languages, the collection gives a broad sense of how literature is among the richest and most engaging sources for historicizing the ageing self.