Argues that novelists graft aging onto narrative duration and reveals the politics of senescence in nineteenth and early-twentieth century plots.

The coming of age of a young protagonist is a well-known theme in British fiction. The Margin that Remains investigates an equally persistent concern in the novel: the coming of age to characters who are no longer young. Janice Sokoloff examines changing visions of aging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, bringing a new perspective to such famous characters as Defoe's Moll Flanders, Charlotte Brontë's Rochester, Henry James' Lambert Strether, and Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, as they face the loss of youth. The Margin that Remains reveals the crucial role of gender in fiction's varied representations of an aging process few of us acknowledge, in novels and in life.

What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.

THE OXFORD BOOK OF AGIN offers some two hundred and fifty pieces that illuminate the pleasures, pains, dreams, and triumphs of people as they strive to live out their days in a meaningful way.

More than thirty years ago, an entire generation sought a new way of life, looking for fulfillment and meaning in a way no one had before. Leaving his teaching job at Harvard, Ram Dass embodied the role of spiritual seeker, showing others how to find peace within themselves in one of the greatest spiritual classics of the twentieth century, the two-million-copy bestseller Be Here Now. As many of that generation enter the autumn of their years, the big questions of peace and of purpose have returned demanding answers. And once again, Ram Dass blazes a new trail, inviting all to join him on the next stage of the journey.

A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century. On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. “If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay,” she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. “Three elderly widows and one old man . . . who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind” serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What is Mrs. Palfrey to do with herself now that she has all the time in the world? Go for a walk. Go to a museum. Go to the end of the block. Well, she does have her grandson who works at the British Museum, and he is sure to visit any day. Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known “the right thing to do,” but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else. Elizabeth Taylor’s final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.

This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Based on the historical premise that the view of ageing as a burden emerges as a specific narrative in the late eighteenth century, the study highlights how the changing experience of ageing is shaped by that of gender. By reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book asks how the telling of a life in time affects individual age narratives. Bringing together the different perspectives of age and disability studies, the book argues that illness is already an important issue in the Bildungsroman's narratives of ageing. This theoretical stance provides new interpretations of canonical novels, visiting authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Jonathan Franzen. Drawing on the link between age and illness in the Bildungsroman's age narratives, the genre of 'dementia narrative' is presented as one of the directions which the Bildungsroman takes after its classical period. Applying these theoretical perspectives to canonical novels of the nineteenth century and to the new genre of 'dementia narrative', the volume also provides new insights into literary and genre history. This book introduces a new theoretical approach to cultural age studies and offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between narratology, literary theory, gender and age studies.

Aging is a gift that we receive with life—and in New Aging, the architect Matthias Hollwich outlines smart, simple ideas to help us experience it that way. New Aging invites us to take everything we associate with aging—the loss of freedom and vitality, the cold and sterile nursing homes, the boredom—and throw it out the window. As an architect, Matthias Hollwich is devoted to finding ways in which we can shape our living spaces and communities to make aging a graceful and fulfilling aspect of our lives. Now he has distilled his research into a collection of simple, visionary principles—brought to life with bright, colorful illustrations—that will inspire you to think creatively about how you can change your habits and environments to suit your evolving needs as you age. With advice ranging from practical design tips for making your home safer and more comfortable to thought-provoking ideas on how we work, relax, and interact with our neighbors, and even how we eat, New Aging will inspire you and your loved ones to live smarter today so you can live better tomorrow.

Does Aging Stop? shatters the conventional beliefs on which aging research has been based for the last fifty years.

The process of aging is familiar to, and usually dreaded by, all of us. We all know what it feels like to grow older, but what exactly is aging, why does it happen, and can anything be done to slow or prevent it? An original treatment of human aging that draws on biomedical research and the natural history of animals and plants, Aging: A Natural History describes this biological phenomenon in fascinating detail, helping the reader to understand its complex processes. In the aging patterns of humans and many other species, biologists Robert E. Ricklefs and Caleb E. Finch find some answers to why aging must exist at all, and why it is so spectacularly different in different species. The authors ask a variety of compelling questions: How can processes that lead to death be such an integral part of life itself? Why do some species tend to die at an early age when close relatives may live much longer? Why do many species age, when others seem not to? And, perhaps most importantly, why is aging, which is so detrimental to the individual, maintained by natural selection? Finally, the authors consider the prospects for prolonging human life and improving the quality of life at older ages. Concluding that aging is induced both by environmental factors and by the biochemical processes normally present in all cells, they show aging to be an inevitable yet alterable part of life - a natural process that may limit activity but is not necessarily debilitating.