Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care

Emily Jeremiah, Shirley Jordan

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783111044576
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Care is fundamental to human survival, yet it is often overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and thought of as 'women's work'. Care of the old is particularly low in status and is too readily occluded. This volume asks why and how cultures of care for older people are negatively configured. It examines some of the powerful responses to relationships of intergenerational care in recent creative works by women. It thereby contributes to the contemporary imperative to transform care by investigating some of the ways in which care might be redefined and reconceptualized. Taking as its focus the representation or narrativization of care in theory, literature, visual culture, and performance, it engages with contemporary female-authored works from diverse cultural contexts, encouraging the development of comparative, cross-cultural perspectives. Narrative is key here, for it is in stories about ageing and care that the complexities and ambiguities of care relationships are made available, and that simplified ideas about them are challenged. This volume will be of interest to scholars in literary and cultural studies, gender studies, critical age studies, the medical and health humanities, and all who are interested in care.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care
• Collaborative Care: Sharing Stories of Ageing in Recent French and Francophone Women’s Writing
• Still the Carer Sex?: Women Ageing and Caring in Contemporary Women’s Writing
• “See this scar on my hand?”: Women’s Graphic Narratives of Ageing and Care
• Co-presence as Care: The Performing Objects of Bérangère Vantusso and trois-six-trente
• The Ethics of Care in Retirement-Home Mystery Narratives
• Caring Fictions: Ageing and Ethics in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing and Joanna Cannon’s Three Things About Elsie
• Speaking of M/Others: Dementia, Care and the Maternal Voice
• “Retomber en enfance”: The “Second Childhood” as a Positive Paradigm of Care in Sophie Fontanel’s Grandir
• “I would not touch her”: Digust, Disamore and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Laudomia Bonanni, Donatella Di Pietrantonio and Maria Grazia Calandrone
• Replenishment and Depletion: The Carers UK Archive and the Crisis of Care
• Index