The project investigates what works of literature (in a broad sense) can show and tell us about the meanings, experiences and practices of aging in Anglophone literatures from the early middle ages until the contemporary moment. It asks theoretical questions about the nature and functions of literary texts concerned with the aging process; it analyses a broad range of literary texts concerned with the aging process with emphasis on the last years of life and the process leading to death, and with an emphasis on their configuration of a new understanding of human life in the twenty-first century. It also accounts empirically for various actual uses of works of literature by aging individuals as part of their process of aging.
Outcomes: a series of papers, a monograph, and various applications for external research funding.
People: