Cultural Histories of Ageing: Myths, Plots and Metaphors of the Senescent Self - Cultural Histories of Ageing: Myths, Plots and Metaphors of the Senescent Self -

How Can Literary Studies Contribute to a Cultural History of Ageing?Using Literary Sources for a Cultural History of Old Age The Senescent Self The Janus Face of Old Age Ageing, Secularization and the Ideology of Progress From a Humanistic to a Gerontological Approach to Old Age Ageing and Changed Attitudes to Death The Need for New and Old Ways of Talking about Ageing So What Does Literature Have to Offer a Cultural History of Ageing?Notes References Narrative Configurations of Ageing and Time The Emergence of Chronometric Time from Cosmological Narratives Narrative Foundation of Chronometric Calendars Ageing in Temporal and Functional Perspectives Some Limits of Chronometric Age in Understanding Ageing The Search for Intrinsic Clocks of Ageing Confusing Causalities Ambiguities of “Ageing”Chronometric Time and Lived Time: An Apparent Dichotomy Narrative Configurations of Time and Ageing Narrative Configurations of the Ageing Self Notes References Using Literary Sources in a World History of Ageing Rêverie and Late Writing: From the Exemplary Montaigne to Rousseau and Baudelaire Reverie as “Transitional Phenomena”The History of the Word Three Innovative Late-Life Oeuvres Associated with Reverie The Apprenticeship of Finitude (and Infinitude)Montaigne’s Back-Shop of the Mind Can the Mind Escape the Ageing Body?Reverie and the Flux of All Things Conclusion Notes References “By Nature Led”: Old Age in William Wordsworth’s Poem “Old Man Travelling”Landscape and “Second Nature”Nature and Imitation Meditatio mortis'. Wordsworth and the Stoic Tradition Conclusion Notes References Ageing and Creativity in Goethe’s Last Works Poetry Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years and Faust Conclusion Notes References Senescence at the Russian Fin-de-Siècle: On the Ageless and the Ageing Self of Lev Tolstoy Tolstoy and the Dream of an Ideal Ageing Ideal and Reality: Contradictions and Conflicts of Tolstoy’s Old Age The Legacy of the Old Tolstoy Notes References Taking Care of the Self: Ageing in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Care of the Self and the Self as Evidence of Knowledge/Power The Taboo of Ageing Notes References Thomas Hardy and the Question of Senescence Hardy’s Narrative and the Agon with Time Old Age and the Ambiguous Category of the Grotesque The Challenge of Old Age and Hardy’s Late Style Wessex Poems and the Time-Torn Self Towards a Reconciliation?Conclusion Notes References “I Do Not Write a Life”: Hamsun, Psychiatry and Life Narrative Narrative and Anti-narrative Lives Psychiatric Life Writing The Psychiatric Report on the Senescent Self Ageing in On Overgrown Paths Conclusion Notes References Solitude and Senescence: May Sarton’s Sense of an Ending Solitude and the Generation of Spontaneous Narrative Gerontology May Sarton Finds Her Voice: Solitude and Senescence Again May Sarton Responding to the Two-Cultures: Illness and Thwarted Ambition Amidst Science and Literature Late Style and the Return “Home”Conclusion Notes References French Female Literary Milestones in the History of Ageing Simone de Beauvoir: Between Ethical Anger and Political Anti-ageism Ageing as a Transpersonal (Auto)pathography: Ernaux, Cixous Fighting Spirit and Marathonian Ageing: Françoise Héritier, Marceline Loridan-Ivens Conclusion Notes References “Je suis vieux et très contemporain”: Old Age and Modernity in the Works of Michel Houellebecq Representing Old Age Disappearance of Old Age?Old Age and Pathos Old Age and Aggression in the Contemporary World Old Age As a Point of View: The Feeling of Being Old Old Age and Values Old Age at the Heart of Writing Notes References Elderly People’s Homes in Contemporary Literature: A New Old World by Mariusz Sieniewicz A Journey of a Young Protagonist to the World of the Old The Island of the Elderly as a Work Camp Institutionalized Care: Extravagant Confinement In Jest But More Often in Earnest Sieniewicz Reading Houellebecq?A Polish Predecessor of Sieniewicz The Rebellion or the Solution at Hand Notes References An Ageing Woman’s Dilemma: The Varieties of Silence in Merethe Lindstrom’s Novel Days in the History of Silence Dementia Narratives Confessions from the Kitchen Table Silence as Signifying Practices Dementia, Silent Memory and Silence As Care Questions of Care and Family Dynamics The Unspoken and the Unspeakable Notes References Notes on Contributors