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Desire in the broadest sense, as a form of generous self-assertion should ideally increase with the passage of time as we gradually acquire deeper insight into ourselves and others. Prescriptive cultural stereotypes, however, put obstacles on our path to progress as individuation. Yet growing older should not entail renunciation of the singularity of personal fulfilment.
This volume is a collection of literary testimonies to the power of art to challenge and resist the social constraints on desire in the context of aging. In the essays, men and women claim their right to age in desire and imaginative vigour.
List of contents
Contents: Nela Bureu Ramos: Introduction: The Aching of Desire - Emma Domínguez Rué: A Woman's Worth: Perceptions of Desire in Mature Women in Ellen Glasgow's Short Fiction - Markus M. Müller: Back to the Body: 'Fantastic' Old Women and Pleasure Regained in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and Suzette Mayr's The Widows - Billy Gray: 'Your stay must be a becoming': Ageing and Desire in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace - Carmen Zamorano Llena: 'The figures of the far past come back at the end': Unmasking the Desired Self through Reminiscence in Late Adulthood in John Banville's The Sea - Gene Walz: Desire and Aging in Manitoba Movies - Isabel Santaulària i Capdevila: From Forajidos to Misfits: Desiring Old Times in Deadwood - Rached Khalifa: 'I am unbroken': Aging, Ireland, and Political Desire in W.B. Yeats - Brian Worsfold: Spur or Pitfall? Aged Men's Desire in Philip Roth's Everyman (2006), André Brink's Before I Forget (2004), and Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller (2005) - Maricel Oró Piqueras: The Indian Rebirth of the English Retired in Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things - Dennis Cooley: «what it was I knew my father felt, what I felt»: hidden grief / unspoken desire in Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue - Elena Pérez Serrano: The ICM (Irish Catholic Mammy) and the Desire for Self-Reinvention in the Walsh Series - Núria Casado Gual: Who Is 'the Other within'? Exploring the Kaleidoscope of Internal Alterity through Laurent Cantet's and Kevin Rodney Sullivan's Films on Mature Female Desire - Marta Miquel Baldellou: Wishing Independence, Pleading Desire: The Duality of (Fe)Male Ageing in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day.
About the author
The Editor: Nela Bureu Ramos is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. She teaches contemporary drama and poetry and Canadian film and literature. Her publications and research interests are focused on contemporary poetry, the theatre of the absurd and Canadian prairie literature. She has also published three volumes of poetry.
