Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Cathy McGlynn is an independent researcher and has taught at the University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland, and the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Republic of Ireland.Margaret O’Neill is Gender ARC Project Coordinator at the University of Limerick and has taught at the University of Limerick and Maynooth University, Republic of Ireland.Michaela Schrage-Früh is Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland Galway, Republic of Ireland, and Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Mainz, Germany.

• 1. Introduction; Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill & Michaela Schrage-Früh.- Part I: NARRATIVES OF AGEING.- 2. Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography; Julia K. Dabbs.- 3. Losing One’s Self: The Depiction of Female Dementia Sufferers in Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011); Eva Adelseck.- 4. “Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman; Michaela Schrage-Früh.- 5. Intersection, Interoception and Interruption: The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw; Bridie Moore.- II: SOCIAL ROLES: MOTHERS, WIDOWS, SPINSTERS.- 6. Closing In: Spatial Restrictions for Ageing Mothers in Jane Austen; Amber Jones.- 7. “No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories; Cathy McGlynn.- 8. Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Television Programme Once Upon a Time; Katherine Whitehurst.- 9. “She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy; Lucinda Rasmussen.- Part III: THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT; 10. Older Women and Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion?; Susan Liddy.- 11. A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction; Theresa Wray.-12. Future and Present Imaginaries: The Politics of the Ageing Female Body in Lena Dunham’s Girls (HB0, 2012 – present); Ros Jennings and Hannah Grist.-13. The New Model Subject: ‘Coolness’ and the Turn to Older Women Models in Lifestyle and Fashion Advertising.- Deborah Jermyn and Anne Jerslev.- 14. Performances of Situated Knowledge in the Ageing Female Body; EL Putnam.- Part IV: CLASS, RACE AND AGENCY.- 15. “I Become Shameless as a Child”: Childhood, Femininity and Older Age in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron; AntoinettePretorius.-16. African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season; Saskia Marguerita Fürst.-17. “This is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light; Margaret O’Neill.- 18. The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013); Kate Antosik-Parsons. 19. Afterword; Germaine Greer.