Aging Studies and Ecocriticism

This collection presents the first substantial encounter between aging studies and ecocriticism. By putting both fields into conversation, it addresses competing ideologies of efficiency, exploitation, and endurance versus those of sustenance, care, and survival.

Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters argues that both aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres, which have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection offers new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations.

Acknowledgments

Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg: Time, Relationality, and Fears of Ending: Encounters between Aging Studies and Ecocriticism

Part I “Aging Bodies and Environments”

1 Silvia Gerlsbeck: “A World in Flux”: Temporality, Aging, and Environmental Change in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Work

2 Christian Lenz: Footprints in the Jungle: Creating a Legacy in the Rainforest

3 Jade E. French: “Zoological Outcasts” and the Aging Other in Jean Rhys’s Late Short Stories

4 Núria Mina-Riera: Embodying Age(ing) in the Non-Human World in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry

5 Simon Dickel: Beyond Reproductive Futurism: Harold and Maude’s Ecological Aesthetics

6 Tina-Karen Pusse and Michaela Schrage-Früh: Time Travel, Age/ing and Ecology in the German Netflix Series

Dark (2017-2020)

Part II “Growing Old Amid Environmental Crises”

7 Adrian Tait: Imagining Longevity and Sustainability in Walter Besant’s The Inner House and William Morris’ News from Nowhere

8 Stephen Hahn: Literature and the “Cultural Scripting” of Aging and Dying

9 Julia Hoydis: Caring (for) Futures: Intergenerational Justice in Contemporary Drama

10 Julia Henderson and Katrina Dunn: Old(er) Women and the Apocalypse: Three Dramatic Representations

11 Albert Banerjee: Learning to Live Well within Limits: Exploring the Existential Lessons of Climate Change and an Aging Population

Part III Afterword

12 Peter J. Whitehouse: Emergent Cosmic Return: The Field of Possibilities for Aging in a Proposed New Geological Epoch

About the Authors