Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Author: Cathy McGlynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-23

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 331963609X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This timely collection engages with representations of women and ageing in literature and visual culture. Acknowledging that cultural conceptions of ageing are constructed and challenged across a variety of media and genres, the editors bring together experts in literature and visual culture to foster a dialogue across disciplines. Exploring the process of ageing in its cultural reflections, refractions and reimaginings, the contributors to Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture analyse how artists, writers, directors and performers challenge, and in some cases reaffirm, cultural constructions of ageing women, as well as give voice to ageing women’s subjectivities. The book concludes with an afterword by Germaine Greer which suggests possible avenues for future research.


Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture

Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture

Author: Michaela Schrage-Früh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-14

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1000588300

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.


The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film

Author: Sarah Falcus

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1350204358

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Across more than 30 chapters spanning migration, queerness, and climate change, this handbook captures how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavor of Age(ing) studies has shaped contemporary literary and film studies. In the early 21st century, the literary study of age and ageing in its cultural context has 'come of age': it has come to supplement and challenge a public discourse on ageing seen mainly as a political and demographic 'problem' in many countries of the world. Following a tripartite structure, it looks first at literary and film genres and how they have been shaped by knowledge about age and ageing, incorporating both narrative genres as well as poetry, drama and imagery. The second section includes chapters on key themes and concepts in Age(ing) Studies with examples from film and literature. The third section brings together case studies focussing on individual artists, national traditions and global ageing. Containing original contributions by pioneers in the field as well as new scholars from across the globe, it brings together current scholarship on ageing in literary and film studies, and offers new directions and perspectives.


A Glorious Freedom

A Glorious Freedom

Author: Lisa Congdon

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1452156212

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“The remarkable women celebrated in [this] vibrantly illustrated collection . . . offer stirring words of encouragement to any woman, of any age” (Booklist). The glory of growing older is the freedom to be more truly ourselves. With age we gain the confidence to pursue bold new endeavors and worry less about what other people think. In this richly illustrated volume, bestselling author and artist Lisa Congdon explores the power of women over the age of forty who are thriving and living life on their own terms. A Glorious Freedom includes profiles, interviews, and essays from women such as Vera Wang, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Julia Child, Cheryl Strayed, and many others who have found creative fulfillment and accomplished great things in the second half of their lives. Each section is lavishly illustrated and hand-lettered in Congdon's signature style.


Women and Ageing

Women and Ageing

Author: Margaret O’Neill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 100024461X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited collection considers the ways older women’s life narratives redefine culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to grow older. Drawing on research from age studies as well as social and cultural gerontology, the contributors explore the subjective accounts and diverse voices of older women. In doing so, they examine the tensions between older women’s social identities versus their individual narratives. In their chapters, the contributors acknowledge, explore and contextualise women’s experiences of growing older, thus counterbalancing the often one-sided, negative representations of ageing perpetuated by dominant cultural discourse. They focus on diverse forms of life writing including memoirs and (auto)biography, digital and visual forms of life narrative as well as autoethnographic accounts. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, life writing by and about older women often necessitates opening out literary forms and modes of critique, searching for narrative and performative strategies, and creating spaces in which to inscribe subjective experiences. Relationships, intergenerational connections, and visual and material cues are often integral to these analyses, which assert the richness of older women’s life narratives. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.


Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries

Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries

Author: Susan Liddy

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-04-26

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 3031183851

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores the challenges facing women from their mid-forties as they attempt to build/maintain careers in the screen industries. Essays are concerned with the intersection of gender and age on screen and behind the camera and how that can create a ‘double jeopardy’. Existing research in this area has been primarily directed to onscreen representation. Female actors, with notable exceptions, struggle to get screen time and expansive roles as they age. Behind the camera, women 45+ also face challenges and roadblocks; to date, less attention has been directed to this group. The cross-cultural research in this collection offers an analysis of representation, on and off screen, touching on film, television, streaming services and film festivals. It includes an exploration of gendered ageism, age bias and stereotyping. It also highlights the achievements of mature female practitioners who, in their work and working lives, embody a resistance to restrictive cultural discourses about ageing women.


Ageing in Irish Writing

Ageing in Irish Writing

Author: Heather Ingman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-18

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 3319964305

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Age is a missing category in Irish literary criticism and this book is the first to explore a range of familiar and not so familiar Irish texts through a gerontological lens. Drawing on the latest writing in humanistic, critical and cultural gerontology, this study examines the portrayal of ageing in fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Deirdre Madden, Anne Enright, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, John McGahern, Norah Hoult and Edna O’Brien, among others. The chapters follow a logical thematic progression from efforts to hold back time, to resisting the decline narrative of ageing, solitary ageing versus ageing in the community, and dementia and the world of the bedbound and dying. One chapter analyses the changing portrayal of older people in the Irish short story. Recent demographic shifts in Ireland have focused attention on an increasing ageing population, making this study a timely intervention in the field of literary gerontology.


Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism

Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism

Author: I. Whelehan

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9781349477715

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How has popular film, television and fiction responded to the realities of an ageing Western population? This volume analyses this field of representation to argue that, while celebrations of ageing as an inspirational journey are increasing, most depictions still focus on decline and deterioration.


Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies

Author: Renée Fox

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 654

ISBN-13: 1000333159

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies begins with the reversal in Irish fortunes after the 2008 global economic crash. The chapters included address not only changes in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland but also changes in disciplinary approaches to Irish Studies that the last decade of political, economic, and cultural unrest have stimulated. Since 2008, Irish Studies has been directly and indirectly influenced by the crash and its reverberations through the economy, political landscape, and social framework of Ireland and beyond. Approaching Irish pasts, presents, and futures through interdisciplinary and theoretically capacious lenses, the chapters in this volume reflect the myriad ways Irish Studies has responded to the economic precarity in the Republic, renewed instability in the North, the complex European politics of Brexit, global climate and pandemic crises, and the intense social change in Ireland catalyzed by all of these. Just as Irish society has had to dramatically reconceive its economic and global identity after the crash, Irish Studies has had to shift its theoretical modes and its objects of analysis in order to keep pace with these changes and upheavals. This book captures the dynamic ways the discipline has evolved since 2008, exploring how the age of austerity and renewal has transformed both Ireland and scholarly approaches to understanding Ireland. It will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, literature, economics, and political science. Chapter 3, 5 and 15 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Cultural Perspectives on Aging

Cultural Perspectives on Aging

Author: Andrea Hülsen-Esch

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 3110683113

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Current demographic developments and change due to long life expectancies, low birth rates, changing family structures, and economic and political crises causing migration and flight are having a significant impact on intergenerational relationships, the social welfare system, the job market and what elderly people (can) expect from their retirement and environment. The socio-political relevance of the categories of ‘age’ and ‘ageing’ have been increasing and gaining much attention within different scholarly fields. However, none of the efforts to identify age-related diseases or the processes of ageing in order to develop suitable strategies for prevention and therapy have had any effect on the fact that attitudes against the elderly are based on patterns that are determined by parameters that or not biological or sociological: age(ing) is also a cultural fact. This book reveals the importance of cultural factors in order to build a framework for analyzing and understanding cultural constructions of ageing, bringing together scholarly discourses from the arts and humanities as well as social, medical and psychological fields of study. The contributions pave the way for new strategies of caring for elderly people.