Introduction

The introduction to this volume outlines literary, cultural, social, and theoretical discourses relevant to the theme of ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture. It summarizes and contextualizes the individual chapters on drama, poetry, fiction, and visual culture in terms of cross-generic thematic concerns and argues for the importance of including age as a critical category. It concludes with the hope that as Irish writers and artists continue to reimagine masculinity through the lens of ageing and to replace tropes and stereotypes with more complex, diverse, and subjective explorations of old age, this book will inspire future scholarship in which ageing is acknowledged and analysed as a marker of identity and often inequity.