Fifteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

One of the new trends in literary and cultural studies criticism is literary gerontology. Literary gerontology intends to approach literary and fictional texts (novels, short stories, poetry, drama and also media productions such as films and TV series) from the perspective of age. One of the questions that literary gerontology poses is to what extent our choices and behaviour is modelled according to cultural and social conceptions attached to age and to a still prevailing ageist society. This paper, thus, intends to introduce and develop the precepts of literary gerontology and to present some of the recurrent topics that analysing literary and fictional texts brings to the surface within a society still corseted in ageing conceptions of the life course. Literary and cultural analysis of fictional texts within literary gerontology offers a multifaceted perception of the experience of ageing by looking into the choices, regrets and hopes of characters set in specific social contexts. In order to exemplify the potential and usefulness of literary gerontology in revising the life course as well as the experience of ageing into the twenty-first century, an analysis of British writer Deborah Moggach’s works are used as cases in point.