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Examines literary treatments, cinematic depictions, and artistic portraits of aging, through the lens of both contemporary gerontological theory and postmodernist concepts.

Table of 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

About the Author

SARA MUNSON DEATS is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of South Florida, and Co-director of the Center of Applied Humanities. She is also author of Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1997). LAGRETTA TALLENT LENKER is Director of the Division of Lifelong Learning and Co-director of the Center for Aplied Humanities and the Florida Center for Writers at the University of South Florida. She was co-editor with Joseph Moxley for The Politics of Scholarship, (Greenwood, 1995).