Women Ageing Through Literature and Experience
Edited by Brian J. Worsfold
Contents Acknowledgements iv Preface, by Tavengwa M. Nhongo vii Introduction xiii Rosario Arias DoblasMoments of Ageing: The Reifungsroman in Contemporary Fiction 3 Susan BallynNobody Prepares You for This: A Layperson’s Experience of Coping with Senile Dementia 13 María José Carrillo LinaresWhat Thing is it that People most (Un)desire? A View on Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Process of Aging 21 Teresa GibertThe Aesthetics of Ageing in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction 31 Billy Gray“Lucky the culture where the old can talk to the young and the young can talk to the old”: Narrative, Biology and Ageing in the Works of Doris Lessing 43 Carmen Lara RalloFemale Ageing as a Thematic Link: Fictionalising Women’s Phases of Life in A.S. Byatt’s Sugar & Other Stories 51 Heather LeachCrossing the Line 63 Maria O’NeillSexuality and Ageing as Depicted in The Canterbury Tales: Gender, Economics and Morality 73 Maricel Oró PiquerasFrom Childhood to Old Age with a Sigh in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun 83 Evelyn PezzulichBreaking the Last Taboo: The Aging Female Protagonist in Literature 91 Cynthia Port“Money, for the night is coming”: Gendered Economies of Aging in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys 99 Aagje Swinnen“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ‘smartest’ one of all?” A Dynamic View of the Elderly Woman in the Reifungsroman: Case Study of Monika van Paemel’s The Cursed Fathers (1985) 117 Carmen Zamorano Llena‘Words we can grow old and die in’: Female Reconstructions of the Irish Literary Idiom in Eavan Boland’s Later Poetry 127 Notes on contributors 139 |