Overview

This volume explores the theme of age and aging, uniquely combining personal reflections from literature professors with sound scholarly analysis of a range of fiction and poetry. Bringing together leading literary scholars, this collection of essays covers a range of writers and texts, representing both the canon and new voices. By combining the chapter authors' expertise as literary and cultural critics with their own responses to novels, short stories and poems, the book offers new insights into the life trajectories made available to fiction and poetry readers through compelling narrative and vivid literary representation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Laurence W. Mazzeno ,  Sue Norton
Publisher:   Springer International Publishing AG
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:  

9783031934858

ISBN 10:   3031934857
Pages:   325
Publication Date:   10 August 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Our life is not our life merely the story we have told about our life Julian Barness The Sense of an Ending.- Chapter 3: Unveiling the Shared Struggles Aging Abandonment and the Odyssey of Women in Elena Ferrantes The Days of Abandonment and Euripides Medea.- Chapter 4: Aging Illness and Storytelling in Sigrid Nunezs What Are You Going Through.- Chapter 5: Grief and Grievance Poetry and Politics in Robert Frost.- Chapter 6: Updikes Toward the End of Time A Meditation on Aging Imagining Other Worlds and the Landscape of Haven Hill.- Chapter 7: I shall therefore take the liberty of treating her as a character Growing Older with David Lodges Nice Work.- Chapter 8: Confronting Old Age in William Boyds Any Human Heart  Isolation Fragility and Unpredictability.- Chapter 9: Readerly Connections in Ian McEwans Lessons and Life and Death Coaching.- Chapter 10: The Light of those Stars Only Reaching Me Now Paula Meehans Steady Gaze in As if by Magic Selected Poems.- Chapter 11: Reading is a Gift Why John Irvings Novels Might Matter More as We Age.- Chapter 12: Toni Morrison  Wise Elders the Help Us Age.- Chapter 13: Suspended Time Arlene Heyman and Aging.- Chapter 14: Coming of Age in Namwali Serpells The Old Drift or the Aging of Postcolonial Fiction.- Chapter 15: Tuesdays with Lorrie.- Chapter 16: Scaling the Ladder of Years Anne Tylers Trilogy of Aging.- Chapter 17: Age and Aging in Some Short Stories by Flannery OConnor.- Chapter 18: From Ancestor Worship to Progeny Worship Barbara Kingsolvers Flight Behavior.- Chapter 19: Aging and Consolation in the Later Poetry of Thomas Hardy.

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Author Information

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, PA, USA. He has published a number of edited volumes with Palgrave, including Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom (with Sue Norton, 2022), Victorian Environmental Nightmares (with Ronald D. Morrison, 2019), Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (with Ronald D. Morrison, 2017) and Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (with Jen Cadwallader, 2017). Sue Norton is Lecturer of English at Technological University Dublin, Ireland.  She is co-editor and contributor to Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom (Palgrave 2022), with Laurence W. Mazzeno.  She is widely published in books and journals on literary studies.

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