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Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition.Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively.Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.

Enhancing the Wellbeing and Wisdom of Older Learners: A Co-research Paradigm examines how lifelong learning, becoming wise, and sharing wisdom are integrally linked to older people’s wellbeing. The book highlights appropriate learning styles and pedagogies for older people, including research models emphasising participation, and offers recommendations for research in lifelong learning with the potential to effect change. Focusing upon a collaborative action research project, ‘Sagaciation’, chapters explore the involvement of older learners in the design and delivery of the scheme, which enabled them to expand their knowledge and skills, and to fully engage as critical and creative voices in a supportive and welcoming environment. The book offers an account of the process of the action research, as well as its findings. The project is set into the context of leading academic thinking on fields such as the growth of an ageing population, the rise of literature on ageing, negative and positive constructions of ageing, social gerontology, the wellbeing and health of older people, and educational gerontology. This book challenges negative representations of older people as a burden by offering a paradigm of hope, resilience, and sagacity within education and beyond. It will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, lifelong learning, gerontology, mental health and wellbeing, and the sociology of education, as well as to policymakers and those working with older people

Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition.Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively.Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.