Cultural Histories of Ageing: Myths, Plots and Metaphors of the Senescent Self

ISBN-13: 9780367769741 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 314 str.

Margery Vibe Skagen

Opis

Drawing on 16th- to 21st-century Western literature, this book teases out culturally specific conceptions of old age as well as subjective constructions of late-life identity. The chapters demonstrate the great potential of interdisciplinary literary studies for historicising the ageing self.

Spis treści

1. How Can Literary Studies Contribute to a Cultural History of Ageing?  2. Narrative Configurations of Ageing and Time  3. Using Literary Sources in a World History of Ageing  4. Rêverie and Late Writing: From the Exemplary Montaigne to Rousseau and Baudelaire  5. "By Nature Led": Old Age in William Wordsworth’s Poem "Old Man Travelling"  6. Ageing and Creativity in Goethe’s Last Works  7. Senescence at the Russian Fin-de-Siècle: On the Ageless and the Ageing Self of Lev Tolstoy  8. Taking Care of the Self: Ageing in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray  9. Thomas Hardy and the Question of Senescence  10. "I Do Not Write a Life": Hamsun, Psychiatry and Life Narrative  11. Solitude and Senescence: May Sarton’s Sense of an Ending  12. French Female Literary Milestones in the History of Ageing  13. "Je suis vieux et très contemporain": Old Age and Modernity in the Works of Michel Houellebecq  14. Elderly People’s Homes in Contemporary Literature: A New Old World by Mariusz Sieniewicz  15. An Ageing Woman’s Dilemma: The Varieties of Silence in Merethe Lindstrøm’s Novel Days in the History of Silence

O autorze

Margery Vibe Skagen is Associate Professor in French Literature at the University of Bergen.