Framing Ageing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research

Framing Ageing, available open access, addresses scholars from across the Humanities and Social Sciences who want to approach the urgent topic of old age in their work, mapping the intellectual state of the field and putting the most salient concepts in action. Bringing together established and emerging scholars of old age from the humanities and social sciences as well as gerontologists and medical practitioners, this open access book showcases new scholarship and provides new methods and terms for ongoing conversations about old age as an object of analysis in contemporary culture. Cultural policy makers and scholars alike regularly describe a "visibility crisis" of old age, a consistent erasure or repression of images of older people from public view. Co-edited by an art historian and two literary scholars with a shared interest in memory, Framing Ageing examines the in/visibility of old age from a range of disciplinary angles, including philosophy, social history, comparative literature and anthropology. In addition to examining literary texts, this volume includes a chapter in graphic form and carries out innovative analyses of film, the built environment, fine art and commercial images. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Langbein, Fuchs, and Cosgrove: "Introduction" Desmond O'Neill: "Cultural Gerontology at the Intersection" Section I. The Open Body: Resisting Biomedical Old Age 1. 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 Age 4. Wendy Martin: "Ageing, Materiality, and Everyday Life" 5. Anne Fuchs, "Gender, the Politics of Looking, and the Narration of Old Age: Elizabeth Strout's Empathetic Realism in Olive, Again" 6. Andrew King, "Reframing LGBT+ Ageing in Challenging Times" Section III. The Language of Ageing: Critical Reading Across Disciplines 7. Ulla Kriebernegg, "Growing Old Amid Climate Change: Dystopian Narratives of Vulnerability 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 and Definitions" Section IV. Intimacy and Experience: Alternative Analyses of Ageing 11. 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 Age 14. 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 American Artists and their Challenge to Late Style"