Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

1. Introduction
Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh

Part I. Narratives of Ageing

2. Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography
Julia K. Dabbs

3. Losing One’s Self: The Depiction of Female Dementia Sufferers in Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011)
Eva Adelseck

4. “Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman

Michaela Schrage-Früh

5. The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw: Intersection, Interoception and Interruption
Bridie Moore

Part II. Social Roles: Mothers, Widows, Spinsters

6. Closing In: Restrictive Spaces for Ageing Mothers in Jane Austen’s Novels
Amber Jones

7. “No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories
Cathy McGlynn

8. Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Television Programme Once Upon a Time

Katherine Whitehurst

9. “She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy

Lucinda Rasmussen

Part III. The Body and Embodiment

10. Older Women and Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion?
Susan Liddy

11. A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction
Theresa Wray

12. Future and Present Imaginaries: The Politics of the Ageing Female Body in Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO, 2012–Present)
Ros Jennings, Hannah Grist

13. The New Model Subject: “Coolness” and the Turn to Older Women Models in Lifestyle and Fashion Advertising
Deborah Jermyn, Anne Jerslev

14. Performances of Situated Knowledge in the Ageing Female Body
EL Putnam

Part IV. Class, ‘Race’ and Agency

15. “I Become Shameless as a Child”: Childhood, Femininity and Older Age in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

Antoinette Pretorius

16. African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season

Saskia Marguerita Fürst

17. “This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light

Margaret O’Neill

18. The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013)
Kate Antosik-Parsons

19. Afterword
Germaine Greer

Keywords: Cultural and Media Studies, Culture and Gender, Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging, Feminist Culture, Media and Communication, Literature, general