The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging

Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: A Smorgasbord for Literature Lovers in Search of More Age-Just Futures
	Why a Major Volume on Literature and Aging Now?
	The Design of the Handbook
	Part 1: Intersections and Intersectionalities
	Part 2: Traveling Concepts
	Part 3: Methodological Innovations
	Part 4: Archival Inquiries
	Looking Forward
	Works Cited
Part I: Intersections and Intersectionalities
	Chapter 2: Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging
		Introduction: Literary Age Studies, Race, and Audre Lorde
		Intersections of Aging
		Lorde and the Life Course
		Change and the Absence of Change
		Body and Voice
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 3: Visibility of Older Black Women in Literature: Female Ancestors in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow
		Introduction
		Black Women and Aging in the US: The Dearth in Literary Gerontology
		Crossing Spiritual Temporalities and the Role of Ancestors in Praisesong for the Widow
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 4: Magical Realism and Older Age: García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende’s The Japanese Lover (2015)
		Introduction
		Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and The Japanese Lover (2015)
		Time and Aging
		Immortalizing Men Through Fame: Objectification of Women Versus Feminist Conceptions of Aging and Sexuality
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 5: Literacy Narratives and Age Identity Across the Life Span
		Introduction
		Rhetorical Analysis as a Method of Age Analysis
		Literacy Narratives and/as Coming-of-Age Stories
		“A Child, in Perpetuity”: Literacy Denied and Adulthood Delayed
		The Costs of Literacy: The Generation Gap
		The Rhetorical Velocity of the Coming-of-Age Literacy Narrative
		Works Cited
	Chapter 6: Revising the Dementia Imaginary: Disability and Age-Studies Perspectives on Graphic Narratives of Dementia
		Introduction: Graphic Counternarratives to the Dementia Imaginary
		Why Graphic Narratives?
		Presuming Competence: Perspective Taking in Wrinkles
		The Narrative Identity Thesis and Co-Constructing Narrative Identity in Aliceheimer’s
		Adaptation through the Beat in Special Exits
		Conclusion: Counterstories for Flourishing
		Works Cited
	Chapter 7: Queer Theory and Narrating Age Outside the Norm of (Re-)Productive Adulthood
		Age at the Periphery: Age Studies and Childhood Studies
		Queerness as Challenge to Linear Age Narratives
		Literary Examples I: (Im)Possibilities of Future Selves
		Literary Examples II: Negotiating Normalcy
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
Part II: Traveling Concepts
	Chapter 8: Growing Older Without Children: Challenging the (Re)production Narrative for Older Women
		Introduction
		Women’s ‘Problems’ and Problematizations
		Methods
		Results
			Selfish
			“You Wouldn’t Understand Because You Don’t Have Any Kids”
			Misplaced Expectations of Caregiving by Others
			Freedom
			“As Long as My Money Is There”
		Discussion
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 9: Gerotranscendence as Literary Theory: Reading the Later Poems of Margaret Avison and W. B. Yeats
		Introduction
		Critical Contexts
		Avison: Quotidian Discoveries
		Yeats: Alternating Moods
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 10: Care Noir: Before and After COVID-19
		Introduction
		Care Noir in Critical Context
		Twentieth-Century Experiments in Care Noir
			Memento Mori
			At the Jerusalem
			House Mother Normal
		Care Noir in and after COVID-19
		Works Cited
	Chapter 11: From Mushroom Men to Mycorrhizal Relations: Imagining Posthuman Aging and Care
		Introduction
		Mycorrhizal Relations and Posthuman Care
		Consider the Mushroom
		Fungal Family: Mycorrhizal Relations in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms
		Fungal Futures
		Works Cited
	Chapter 12: Intergenerationality, Age, and Environment in Children’s Picturebooks
		Introduction
		Children’s Literature and Aging
		Age, Environment, and the Natural World
		Generational Imagination and the Environment in Stardust and Jiichan no naisho no umi
			Stardust (2017)
			Jiichan no naisho no umi (Grandpa’s Secret Sea, 1993)
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 13: Age in Contemporary Drama and Performance: The Value of Considering Theatrical Time
		Introduction
		Traveling Concepts: Theoretical Lens of Dramatic Time Structures
		About the Plays
		Time in August: Osage County
		Time in 4000 Miles
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
Part III: Methodological Innovations
	Chapter 14: Constructing ‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach
		Introduction
		State of the Art
		Corpus and Method
		Explicit Age Norms about “Old” Age: Death and Decline
		Implicit Age Norms in Adult Characters’ Dialogue: From Okay to Amen
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 15: Finding the Right Wor(l)ds: Creative Writing as Aesthetic and Existential Practice in Later Life
		Introduction
		Creative Writing as Straddling Narrative and Poetic Language
			Creative Writing as Autobiographical and Narrative Aging
			Creative Writing as Poetic and Expressive Language
		Setting the Stage
		Bridging the Existential and Aesthetic: Creative Writing in Later Life
			Seeing Things Anew through Poetic Language
			Poetry and Narrative as Revisiting Significant Life Events and as Therapeutic Opening
			The Creative Use of Nostalgia
		A Community of Writers
		Closing Reflections
		Works Cited
	Chapter 16: Creative Explorations for the Theatrical ‘Age Turn’: Toward a New Dramaturgy of Older Age
		Introduction
		Explorations in Theater and Aging Studies
		Experience in the Spotlight: A Small-Scale Study with Older Actors
		On Writing Scenes Toward a New Dramaturgy of Aging
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 17: (Re)interpreting Aging by Reading: Creativity, Wisdom, and Quality of Life in Older Age
		Introduction
			Critical Contexts
		Methodology
			The Larger Project
			Sessions with the Reading Group
			The Novels
		Aging and Saging: Wisdom, Creativity, and Quality of Life
			Wise and Old? Wisdom and Experience
			The Emotional Quality of Memory and Wisdom
			The Impact of Leisure Reading on Wisdom and Quality of Life
		Conclusions
		Works Cited
	Chapter 18: Reading as Caring: Older Lay Readers’ Responses to the Dementia Narrative Stammered Songbook
		Introduction: Dementia Narratives and the Rehabilitation of the Lay Reader
		State of the Art: Ethnomethodological Approaches to Uses of Literature by Older Readers
		Set-Up of the Literary Fieldwork
		Findings
			“He tries to tell his sorrow the best way he can, but it is as if it has not been fully felt”: Stammered Songbook and Affect
			“Baroque stammering” that Is “theatrical, artificial, cruel, and humorless”: Contemplations on Style and Resistance to Harmful Imagery
			“Take her in your arms, do something!”: Missed Care Opportunities
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 19: Age and Its Metaphors
		Introduction
		Metaphors We Age by: Why We (Should) Care about Metaphors
		Aged by Metaphors: Metaphors in Age Studies
		Belaboring Metaphors: Conceptualizing Use and Reuse
		Decline and Battle: Examples of Use and Reuse
		Metaphor Theory from an Age-Studies Perspective
		Concluding Thoughts
		Works Cited
Part IV: Archival Inquiries
	Chapter 20: Age Identity in Old and Middle English Literature
		Introduction
		The Ages of Man
		Escaping the Ages of Man
		Re-evaluating the Ages of Man
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 21: Fantasies of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture
		Introduction
		Critical Contexts
		The Myth of the Fountain
		Cornaro’s Countervention
		Supercentenarian Narratives
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 22: “A Female, & Past 60 Years of Age!”: Older Age in Women’s Later Life Writing 1800–1850
		Introduction
		Women’s Life Writing, Age Studies, and the Nineteenth Century
		Frances Burney (1752–1840): “My Pen Lingers Now”
		Catherine Hutton (1756–1846): “The Friend of Two Generations”
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 23: American Modernity and the Narrative Arcs of Aging
		Introduction
		The Question of a Youth-Centric Modernity
		Age Consciousness in a Larger Community
		Constructing Familial Time in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
		Faulkner and a Racialized Age
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 24: Sex and the Senex: The Weight of Tradition in Desire under the Elms
		Introduction
		Critical Contexts
		Working with and against the Senex Type
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 25: Grief Representation in Late Poetry: Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912–13” and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters
		Introduction: Aging, Death, and Grief in the Twentieth Century
		Late Poetry, Late Style: Between Continuity and Rupture
		Gendered Constellations of Grief, I: Thomas Hardy and Emma Hardy in “Poems of 1912–13”
			Gendered Grief Expression: Conflicted Communication, Multiple Aged Selves
		Gendered Constellations of Grief, II: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters
			Conflicted Grief: The Textually Fixed Moment of Female Youth and the Continuous Rewritings of Male Aging
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 26: Gerontological Poetry of the Scandinavian Welfare State
		Introduction: Position in the Field
		The Problem of Poetry
		Gerontological Poetry
		Into the Archive
			Time(s)
			Affects
			Well-being
		Age, Poetry, and the Scandinavian Welfare Regime
		Directions for Future Scholarship
		Works Cited
	Chapter 27: Affirmations of Aging Masculinity in Victorian Fiction: Older Men at the Margins
		Introduction
		Critical Contexts
		The Novels: An Introduction
		The Warden and Great Expectations: Close Reading
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	Chapter 28: Aging and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies
		Introduction
		Postcolonial Age Studies
		The Aging of Empire
		The Lifeblood of Empire
		The Age Drain
		The Grand Old Man of India
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
Part V: Finale
	Chapter 29: Are Older People Still Human? On Ageist Humor
		It Is in Our Societal Interest to Doubt the Spontaneity of Our Laughter
		The Form and the Zeitgeist
		Age Studies Goes to Town with Humor
		#StillHuman?
		As Age Ideology Circulates
		All the Clichés in One Fell Swoop
		No Longer Laughing
		#ComicArtistsAgainstAgeism
		Onward and Upward with the Comic Arts
		Works Cited
Index