Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature

This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book brings together perspectives of age and disability study to provide new insights into literary and genre history, visiting canonical authors such as Goethe, Burney, Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Beckett, and Franzen and exploring the new genre of "dementia narrative." This book introduces a new theoretical approach to cultural age studies and offers an analysis of the connection between narratology, literary theory, gender, and age studies.