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This volume explores the theme of age and aging, uniquely combining personal reflections from literature professors with sound scholarly analysis of a range of fiction and poetry. Bringing together leading literary scholars, this collection of essays covers a range of writers and texts, representing both the canon and new voices. By combining the chapter authors' expertise as literary and cultural critics with their own responses to novels, short stories and poems, the book offers new insights into the life trajectories made available to fiction and poetry readers through compelling narrative and vivid literary representation.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Our life is not our life merely the story we have told about our life Julian Barness The Sense of an Ending.- Chapter 3: Unveiling the Shared Struggles Aging Abandonment and the Odyssey of Women in Elena Ferrantes The Days of Abandonment and Euripides Medea.- Chapter 4: Aging Illness and Storytelling in Sigrid Nunezs What Are You Going Through.- Chapter 5: Grief and Grievance Poetry and Politics in Robert Frost.- Chapter 6: Updikes Toward the End of Time A Meditation on Aging Imagining Other Worlds and the Landscape of Haven Hill.- Chapter 7: I shall therefore take the liberty of treating her as a character Growing Older with David Lodges Nice Work.- Chapter 8: Confronting Old Age in William Boyds Any Human Heart Isolation Fragility and Unpredictability.- Chapter 9: Readerly Connections in Ian McEwans Lessons and Life and Death Coaching.- Chapter 10: The Light of those Stars Only Reaching Me Now Paula Meehans Steady Gaze in As if by Magic Selected Poems.- Chapter 11: Reading is a Gift Why John Irvings Novels Might Matter More as We Age.- Chapter 12: Toni Morrison Wise Elders the Help Us Age.- Chapter 13: Suspended Time Arlene Heyman and Aging.- Chapter 14: Coming of Age in Namwali Serpells The Old Drift or the Aging of Postcolonial Fiction.- Chapter 15: Tuesdays with Lorrie.- Chapter 16: Scaling the Ladder of Years Anne Tylers Trilogy of Aging.- Chapter 17: Age and Aging in Some Short Stories by Flannery OConnor.- Chapter 18: From Ancestor Worship to Progeny Worship Barbara Kingsolvers Flight Behavior.- Chapter 19: Aging and Consolation in the Later Poetry of Thomas Hardy.
