Framing Ageing

Anne Fuchs is Professor and Director of the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin, Ireland.Julia Langbein is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.Mary Cosgrove is Professor of German and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

• Langbein, Fuchs, and Cosgrove: “Introduction”Desmond O’Neill: “Cultural Gerontology at the Intersection”Section I. The Open Body: Resisting Biomedical Old Age1. Robert Zwinjenberg: “Ageing, Biomedicine and the ‘Risk of Life’”2. Linda Shortt: “(Un)Fit Ageing: Hermann Kinder and the Ageing Male”3. Aleida Assmann, “On Wisdom”Section II. The Everyday: Locating Complexity in Old Age4. Wendy Martin: “Ageing, Materiality, and Everyday Life”5. Anne Fuchs, “Gender, the Politics of Looking, and the Narration of Old Age: ElizabethStrout's Empathetic Realism in Olive, Again”6. Andrew King, “Reframing LGBT+ Ageing in Challenging Times”Section III. The Language of Ageing: Critical Reading Across Disciplines7. Ulla Kriebernegg, “Growing Old Amid Climate Change: Dystopian Narratives ofVulnerability and Resistance”8. Gillian Pye, “Well-Being and Happiness in Care Home Narratives”9. Susan Pickard, “Gender, Sexuality, and The Double-Standard of Ageing in Later Life”10. Moise Roche: “Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Later Life: Problematic Categorisations andDefinitions”Section IV. Intimacy and Experience: Alternative Analyses of Ageing11. Dana Walrath: “Between Alice and the Eagle: Dementia Journeys and the Final Breath”12. Ailbhe Smith, “Unseen, Unheard, Untouched: A View from the Interior”13. Helen Doherty, “Heard and Seen: Distance and Proximity in Ken Wardrop’s Cocooned(2021)”Section V. The Social Imaginary: History and the Public Face of Old Age14. David Troyanski, “JR’s Wrinkles of the City’ Project: Representing Global Old Age,2008-2015”15. Mary Cosgrove, “The Meaning of Middle Age in Terézia Mora’s Darius-Kopp Trilogy”16. Julia Langbein, “Born Old: The ‘Discovery’ of a Lost Generation of Black AmericanArtists and their Challenge to Late Style”

This is an important collection that begins to establish what the editors call a ‘lyric gerontology’. It is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary volume that brings together fields including psychology, literary studies and ethics.