ABSTRACT
Following the publication of the author’s Aging in World History (2016), which surveys an international historical literature, this chapter examines the variety of ways historians of ageing (including the author) have employed literary sources. This essay characterizes historians’ traditional approaches: using literary texts as illustrative material, analysing the evolution of literary tropes and genres in serial fashion, and relying upon literary works as default sources for exploring subjectivities and emotions. It refers to recent works in far-flung areas, from ancient Mesopotamia and medieval Japan to early modern England and twentieth-century Australia. Along the way it discusses how social and cultural historians have made often very different uses of literary sources as well as how literary scholars have contributed to our understanding of the history of old age. It concludes with reflections on methodological concerns raised by studies of literary and non-literary texts, including the content and rhetoric of pension demands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
