Ulla Kriebernegg - Böcker

In this major new study, James Aaron Green provides the first account of literary thought experiments published from 1878 to 1918 that speculate on the prospect of radically longer lives. Green argues that these fictions helped negotiate the emergent experiences and meanings of age and aging during years when long-established norms were being eroded and supplanted. By recovering fictions by lesser-known writers and re-evaluating those by more familiar writers like H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie, the study reveals the surprising abundance and formal diversity of such speculative accounts. Through readings supported by archival materials (anti-aging advertisements, medical treatises), these accounts are shown to have intervened on a wide range of scientific and social questions related to age and aging – from transfusion to colonialism, and second chances to apocalyptic demography. Ultimately, Green’s innovative historicist study proves how close attention to fictions of radical life extension can not only renovate our understanding of historical attitudes to age and aging, but also those of today.

Based on close readings of three major sitcoms, this book unpacks how sitcoms understand later life sexualities and focusses on how they represent sexually active older adults.Focusing on three representative sitcoms - Waiting for God, The Old Guys and Vicious - it demonstrates the ways in which sitcoms specifically enable and restrict representations of later life sexualities. Tracing how transgressive portrayals of sexually active older adults are couched in comedic terms, it opens up new critical perspectives on later life sexualities that will critically inform public debates and academic research – in Britain and beyond.

Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters argues that both aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres, which have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection offers new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations.

Institutional care for seniors offers a cultural repository for fears and hopes about an aging population. Although enormous changes have occurred in how institutional care is structured, the legacies of the poorhouse still persist, creating panicked views of the nursing home as a dreaded fate. The paradoxical nature of a space meant to be both hospital and home offers up critical tensions for examination by age studies scholars.The essays in this book challenge stereotypes of institutional care for older adults, illustrate the changes that have occurred over time, and illuminate the continuities in the stories we tell about nursing homes.