Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings

✍ Scribed by Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh (eds.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 338
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction (Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh)....Pages 1-20
Front Matter ....Pages 21-21
Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography (Julia K. Dabbs)....Pages 23-40
Losing One’s Self: The Depiction of Female Dementia Sufferers in Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011) (Eva Adelseck)....Pages 41-54
“Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman (Michaela Schrage-Früh)....Pages 55-71
The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw: Intersection, Interoception and Interruption (Bridie Moore)....Pages 73-92
Front Matter ....Pages 93-93
Closing In: Restrictive Spaces for Ageing Mothers in Jane Austen’s Novels (Amber Jones)....Pages 95-109
“No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories (Cathy McGlynn)....Pages 111-128
Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Television Programme Once Upon a Time (Katherine Whitehurst)....Pages 129-145
“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)....Pages 147-164
Front Matter ....Pages 165-165
Older Women and Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion? (Susan Liddy)....Pages 167-180
A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction (Theresa Wray)....Pages 181-193
Future and Present Imaginaries: The Politics of the Ageing Female Body in Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO, 2012–Present) (Ros Jennings, Hannah Grist)....Pages 195-215
The New Model Subject: “Coolness” and the Turn to Older Women Models in Lifestyle and Fashion Advertising (Deborah Jermyn, Anne Jerslev)....Pages 217-234
Performances of Situated Knowledge in the Ageing Female Body (EL Putnam)....Pages 235-252
Front Matter ....Pages 253-253
“I Become Shameless as a Child”: Childhood, Femininity and Older Age in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (Antoinette Pretorius)....Pages 255-273
African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season (Saskia Marguerita Fürst)....Pages 275-287
“This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (Margaret O’Neill)....Pages 289-301
The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013) (Kate Antosik-Parsons)....Pages 303-320
Afterword (Germaine Greer)....Pages 321-325
Back Matter ....Pages 327-336

✦ Subjects

Culture and Gender