Literature and Ageing

Our Research

Staff in English work on topics relating to literary representations of ageing across the life course, from adolescence to older age, and explore the intersections of age identity with gender, race, and colonialism.

This work informed an English Impact Case Study for REF 2021 - ‘The Good Age: Transforming Attitudes to Older Age through Literary Engagement’.

Current Topics 

The team is working on a number of projects including:

The recovery of personal narratives of late life in journals, correspondence, and auto/biographies in both print and manuscript by early nineteenth-century women. This research informs understanding of women’s older age in the Romantic period and provides new theoretical frameworks for the analysis of life writing.

Masculinity and representations of older age, as well as childhood and adolescence, in the Victorian novel, including the work of George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins.

Contemporary ageing outside the (white) Global North, drawing together age studies, postcolonial literary criticism, the Medical Humanities, and dementia studies to analyse fiction, television, and film from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Caribbean.

Research on sexuality and older age in the work of modern Japanese writers and on popular fictions of regeneration or rejuvenation across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Image: G. O. Wasenius, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons