Writing on Culture and Identity

What do literary texts tell us about growing old? The essays in this volume introduce and explore representations of ageing and old age in canonical works of English and postcolonial literature. The contributors examine texts by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace and, together with a medical study, they suggest solutions to the challenges arising from the current demographic change brought about by ageing Western populations.

The author of the classic bestselling guide On Writing Well tells readers how to write about the people and places in their lives, as well as how to make bold choices and live as fully as possible.

Since 1900, the average life expectancy in the developed world has almost doubled, from 45 to 80. "We are almost a new species," declared the English writer V.S. Pritchett, while pointing out that this means "most of us have to face the prospect of a long old age before we die." Pritchett is one of five great writers--along with Stanley Kunitz, Doris Lessing, Mavis Gallant and Russell Baker--whose novels, short stories, poems and essays about old age, written in old age, are examined in this book.