ABSTRACT
This piece surveys the overarching themes and theories represented in the volume, illustrating how literary texts bear witness to longue durée representations of old age and epochal discontinuities in cultural attitudes to the aged. It foregrounds the special role of literature in the construction of a cultural history of ageing and gerontology’s need of cultural history. Historicizing the senescent self through analysis of literary sources strengthens awareness of the subjective and symbolic aspects of growing older, enriching and nuancing current discourses of ageing generally subject to impoverished meaning and taboo. In Western culture, persisting ideals and prejudices have sustained the image of a Janus-faced old age, revealing a continuous history of ambivalence and distantiation – the distance of rejection and idealization, ignorance and exotism. But positive and negative stereotypes, although reductive and easily misused, cannot be eliminated from the cultural imagination. Literature provides elaborated variations of archetypes, featuring characters who accept, deny or revolt against culturally and biologically defined age. Literary use of conflict, irony and pathos depends on basic oppositions, even crudely contradictory tendencies. Literature can expose and transcend age-related dichotomies without denying complexity, ambiguity and paradox, allowing us to embrace clarity and confusion, growth and decline at the same time.
