Full Description
Viewing artistic works through the lens of both contemporary gerontological theory and postmodernist concepts, the contributing scholars examine literary treatments, cinematic depictions, and artistic portraits of aging from Shakespeare to Hemingway, from Horton Foote to Disney, from Rembrandt to Alice Neale, while also comparing the attitudes toward aging in Native American, African American, and Anglo American literature. The examples demonstrate that long before gerontologists endorsed a Janus-faced model of aging, artists were celebrating the diversity of the elderly, challenging the bio-medical equation of senescence with inevitable senility. Underlying all of this discussion is the firm conviction that cultural texts construct as well as encode the conventional perceptions of their society; that literature, the arts, and the media not only mirror society's mores but can also help to create and enforce them.
Contents
Introduction by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker
The Aging Male in Literature
The Dialectic of Aging in Shakespeare's King Lear and The Tempest by Sara Munson Deats
Shakespeare Teaching Geriatrics: Lear and Prospero as Case Studies in Aged Heterogeneity by Kirk Combe and Kenneth Schmader
Why? versus Why Not? Potentialities of Aging in Shaw's Back to Methuselah by Lagretta Tallent Lenker
Hemingway's Aging Heroes and the Concept of Phronesis by Phillip Sipiora
Bertrand Russell in His Nineties: Aging and the Problem of Biography by William T. Ross
The Aging Female in Literature
Work, Contentment, and Identity in Aging Women in Literature by Rosalie Murphy Baum
Old Maids and Old Mansions: The Barren Sisters of Hawthorne, Dickens, and Faulkner by Maryhelen C. Harmon
The Aging Artist: The Sad but Instructive Case of Virginia Woolf by Joanne Trautmann Banks
Aging in the Community
The Sacred Ghost: The Role of the Elder(ly) in Native American Literature by David Erben
Aging and the African-American Community: The Case of Ernest J. Gaines by Charles J. Heglar and Annye L. Refoe
Aging and the Continental Community: Good Counsel in the Writings of Two Mature European Princesses, Marguerite de Navarre and Madame Palatine by Christine McCall Probes
Aging and Academe: Caricature or Character by Helen Popovich and Deborah Noonan
Aging and the Public Schools: Visits of Charity-The Young Look at the Old by Ralph M. Cline
Aging in the Fine and Popular Arts
Aging and Contemporary Art by Linnea S. Dietrich
The Return Home: Affirmations of Aging and Transformations of Identity in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful by Carol J. Jablonski
Animated Gerontophobia: Ageism, Sexism, and the Disney Villainess by Merry G. Perry
8 1/2 and Me: The Thirty-Two Year Difference by Norman N. Holland
Bibliography
Index
