Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography

Chapter 3 Losing One’s Self: The Depiction of Female Dementia Sufferers in Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011)

Chapter 4 “Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman

Chapter 5 The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw: Intersection, Interoception and Interruption

Chapter 6 Closing In: Restrictive Spaces for Ageing Mothers in Jane Austen’s Novels

Chapter 7 “No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories

Chapter 8 Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Television Programme Once Upon a Time

Chapter 9 “She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy

Chapter 10 Older Women and Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion?

Chapter 11 A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction

Chapter 12 Future and Present Imaginaries: The Politics of the Ageing Female Body in Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO, 2012–Present)

Chapter 13 The New Model Subject: “Coolness” and the Turn to Older Women Models in Lifestyle and Fashion Advertising

Chapter 14 Performances of Situated Knowledge in the Ageing Female Body

Chapter 15 “I Become Shameless as a Child”: Childhood, Femininity and Older Age in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

Chapter 16 African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season

Chapter 17 “This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light

Chapter 18 The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013)

Chapter 19 Afterword