Product Description: This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Based on the historical premise that the view of ageing as a burden emerges as a specific narrative in the late eighteenth century, the study highlights how the changing experience of ageing is shaped by that of gender...read more

Product Description: Since 1900, the average life expectancy in the developed world has almost doubled, from 45 to 80. "We are almost a new species," declared the English writer V.S. Pritchett, while pointing out that this means "most of us have to face the prospect of a long old age before we die...read more

Product Description: Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people...read more

Product Description: In Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance: Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne Cynthia Skenazi explores a shift in attitudes towards aging and provides a historical perspective on a crucial problem of our time. From the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, the elderly subject became a point of new social, medical, political, and literary attention on both sides of the Alps...read more

Product Description: This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history...read more

Product Description: Academic work in a range of disciplines has been making an important contribution to the fraught and confusing debate around ageing, and alongside economics, psychology, history and sociology, literature too, through writers' consciousness and experience, can provide valuable insights into the attitudes and prejudices prevalent in society...read more

Product Description: How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whose works mark the last quarter century of Elizabeth I s reign as one of the richest moments in all of English literature, regard and represent old age? Was late life seen primarily as a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, as scholars and historians have traditionally maintained? In this book, Christopher Martin examines how, contrary to received impressions, writers and thinkers of the era working in the shadow of the kinetic, long-lived queen herself contested such prejudicial and dismissive social attitudes...read more

Product Description: This study focuses on themes and techniques of empowerment in the full range of produced plays by Caryl Churchill from 1960 to the present. The playwright is well known for combining theatrical inventiveness with uncompromising social critique...read more