This special issue on ageing and literature contributes to an expanding field at the intersection of literary studies and age studies. Building on foundational work of the last decades of the twentieth century (Gullette a, b; Wyatt-Brown; Woodward), scholarship that brings together these fields is underpinned by a political commitment to challenging ageism. Recent collections of work in this area (Lipscomb and Swinnen; Falcus et al.; Barry and Skagen) showcase the wealth of interdisciplinary, ethically driven work that makes the case for the importance of literary narratives in both reflecting and shaping our understanding and experience of ageing across the lifecourse. This scholarship is methodologically diverse, addresses a wide range of genres and forms, and is informed by an intersectional approach. Despite this growth in the field, the importance of the humanities and of literary studies to gerontological knowledge and our understanding of ageing cannot be assumed. As Shirley Jordan makes clear in her introduction to the recent volume Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care, assertions of the value of the humanities, and of literature in particular, to gerontological study are made frequently and yet still need to be made (Jeremiah and Jordan). We concur with Jordan’s view that “writing [is] fundamentally creative and constitutive of how we see and experience the world” and that it offers us insights into the experience of ageing that are otherwise unavailable (3). And we see this volume as a contribution to that assertion of the value of literary age studies.
The contributions in this collection bring together work across genres, from poetry to children’s literature, and seek to connect age studies with other disciplines and fields of study, from grief studies to memory studies. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary and vibrant nature of the field, the articles offer focused and contextual analyses of key texts and areas. The authors are connected by their concern with the role of the narrative, making a strong case for the value of the humanities in studies of ageing.
The issue begins with a meditation on age and loss. The first two articles attend to illness and grief, with works by Lesley Saunders and Heike Hartung respectively. Both writers focus on ageing, malady, and bereavement, offering very different perspectives on the subject. Saunders contributes to the growing body of work in literature, film, and dementia (Zimmermann a, b; Goldman; Medina; Deng). In her article, she interrogates the dominant medicalised and reductive discourses surrounding dementia, arguing that they stem from and intensify fear as well as stigma, contributing to the sense of a loss of personhood. Forging together her work as a poet, as well as personal experience with illness, the author proposes poetry as a privileged mode for engaging with dementia, precisely because it resists linear narrativity and accommodates ambiguity, fragmentation, and emotional excess. Through close critical and yet also deeply personal readings of selected poems from Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective, the article demonstrates how loss, absence, and identity dissolution are articulated through a poetics of restraint, silence, and “present absences”. Saunders makes a compelling case for the ethical and necessary form of knowledge offered by literary texts.
Heike Hartung turns to an event that still looms large in recent history: the Covid-19 pandemic. She explores how the experience of loss—particularly salient in later life—is re-shaped under conditions of social restriction, confinement, and heightened vulnerability. Recognising the centrality of time in experiences of grief and loss, Hartung nevertheless makes the case that space and mobility are affected by grief. Through an analysis of literary texts by Jhumpa Lahiri and Arshia Sattar, the article demonstrates how grief is articulated via spatial metaphors of confinement, long distance, and dislocation, which resonate strongly with experiences of ageing marked by isolation, bodily vulnerability, and disrupted social bonds. These narratives illuminate how other forms of loss—such as the dwindling of autonomy, routine, and intergenerational contact—produce new affective geographies that shape later-life subjectivities. Hartung’s article provides an important account of literary representations of pandemic grief, offering insights into how space, care, and relationality mediate resilience, precarity, and ethical responsibility toward the other in contexts of extended longevity and crisis.
Moving away from grief, loss, and illness, Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus are, nevertheless, also concerned with the spatial: in this case, the role of the garden in intergenerational children’s literature. Children’s literature scholars such as Vanessa Joosen have demonstrated the ways in which studies of children’s literature and age studies can be brought together to enrich our understanding of ageing across the lifecourse. Sako and Falcus build on their previous work in this area to consider how picturebooks about grandparent and grandchild relationships contribute to our age imaginaries. In particular, they explore how the garden, as a space with its own long literary history, provides a liminal and creative place for intergenerational connection within these books.
The intersection of age and gender has been immensely fruitful in literary age studies, and the contributions of Mariana Cruz and Zuzanna Zarebska demonstrate the ongoing centrality of this scholarly approach. Zuzanna Zarebska offers a sustained critical reading of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (2023) as a meditation on ageing, trauma, and later-life transformation, focussing on a middle-aged female narrator who withdraws from urban life into religious seclusion. She conceptualises ageing not as decline but as a reflective and philosophically productive life phase marked by contemplation, ethical reckoning, and the possibility of renewal. Drawing on lifecourse theory, ecocriticism, and feminist perspectives, the article shows how unresolved personal and collective trauma—linked to gendered violence, colonisation, migration, and ecological damage—resurfaces in later life and demands reworking rather than repression. It argues that Wood’s “quiet fiction” privileges stillness, solitude, and non-normative agency as alternatives to dominant narratives of successful or active ageing. Overall, the article positions ageing as a relational, ecological, and ethical process, in which later life enables new forms of appeasement of trauma, meaning-making, responsibility, and connection between self, community, and the natural world.
Examining Jon Hassler’s Simon’s Night (1979) through the lens of age and gender studies, Mariana Cruz contributes to the growing scholarship in the area of ageing and masculinity (Hobbs; Armengol). Focusing on the protagonist’s transition into long-term residential care, the article analyses how institutionalization precipitates a process of social “de-gendering,” threatening “hegemonic” masculine identities grounded in autonomy, productivity, and physical competence. The study situates Simon’s escape from the nursing home and his recovery of activities associated with middle age within dominant cultural narratives of positive or successful aging. However, it contends that this apparent empowerment ultimately reinforces prescriptive ideals of independence and activity, rather than enabling more fluid or inclusive models of masculinity in later life. Cruz recognises the complexity of literary narratives in her conclusion that Simon’s Night both challenges declinist views of ageing and simultaneously reproduces normative age and gender ideologies by equating aging well with the continued performance of hegemonic masculine norms.
Finally, Elena Bollinger turns to a subject that has received less attention within literary ageing studies: the connection between silence, memory, and growing old. Central to this article is the relationship between memory and forgetting in older age, in this case refracted through a study of the role of silence as, in Bollinger’s words, “a dynamic discursive force”. To explore this, Bollinger analyses a selection of writings by Julian Barnes, a writer for whom silence and secrets are powerful tools. Seeking to forge a stronger relationship between age studies and memory studies, Bollinger makes the case for the power of silence within literary narratives that represent human experiences of time and ageing.
Engaging with grief, decline, and illness, but also connection, resilience, and care, these articles demonstrate the power of literary narratives and the crucial role they play in our individual and social negotiation of embodied selfhood changing across time. The categories that they address are vast, from childhood to adulthood to gender, social background, and race. Simultaneously, they explore ageing as the driving force behind individual voices and those of the society, either to appease or disturb, to give or withdraw agency and to make life meaningful at all moments.
We hope this collection will encourage further dialogue between age studies and the humanities at large and that it will forge new paths of discernment.