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Literary studies and their associated critical theories offer a refreshing viewpoint from which humanist-oriented studies of ageing may be re-conceptualized, and an integrated view of ageing and gender can be developed. The present volume builds on the work of seminal authors in the field of literary gerontology, while it also elaborates on important theories that age-critics have developed in the broader field of cultural gerontology, to present the experience of ageing, and old age in particular, as a creative phase of the life course that completes the older person's identity and, specifically, that of the older woman. As a contrast to stereotypical views of ageing women that are still sustained in both gerontological and social domains, the essays in this collection focus on the works of eleven women writers whose careers were or have been prolonged into their old age, and whose later literary creativity reveals fascinating aspects about both the complex, contradictory, and enriching experience of growing older, and especially of doing so as an artist and as a woman.
List of contents
Acknowledgements - Introduction: Re-Discovering the Older Woman - Marta Miquel-Baldellou: «The only thing to do is to carry on, and the storm will blow over.» The Aging Process of Daphne du Maurier's Writing-Persona in Her Late Short Fiction - Núria Casado-Gual: Mapping the Journey 'between One's Origins and One's Achievements': Joanna McClelland Glass' Dramaturgical Creativity - Maricel Oró-Piqueras: Fictionalising Biography Throughout the Life-course: Creative Memory in Penelope Lively's Making It Up - Josephine Dolan: The Cooking of Friendships: Nora Ephron and the Life-Work of «Mediated Intimacy» - Carmen Zamorano Llena: A Brave Old Age: Changes in the Irish Family Trope in Jennifer Johnston's Later Fiction - Ieva Stoncikaité: Erica Jong: From a Youthful Fear of Flying to a More Experienced Landing in Her Late Years - Brian Worsfold: «That's the Spirit!» Putting the Past to Rights in A.S. Byatt's Ragnarök. The End of the Gods (2011) - Marta Cerezo-Moreno: Anne Tyler's Noah's Compass: Progress towards Wisdom - Núria Mina-Riera: The Beginning of Lorna Crozier's Late-Style: A Thematic Change in the Symbol of Snow - Suzanne Bailey: P.K. Page, Late-Style, and Gerotranscendence: The «Here/There» of Aging - Sarah Falcus: Wicked Weldon: The 'F Word' and the Older Woman - Notes on contributors
About the author
Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, and Brian Worsfold are members of the research group Grup Dedal-Lit of the University of Lleida. Specialists in theatre in English, American Studies, and African literatures, respectively, they have all integrated their fields of expertise into their study of ageing in contemporary literatures in English through their various projects and numerous publications.
