1,721,005 research outputs found
Ageing and generation in recent narratives of longevity
No full textFrom Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels ([1726] 2013) to Neal Shusterman’s young adult Arc of a Scythe series, namely, Scythe (2017), Thunderhead (2019), The Toll (2020), authors have narrated and imagined future worlds in which some kind of ‘cure’ for ageing has been found. The quest for youthfulness in the form of longevity or immortality has long been central to speculative and science fiction. As Teresa Mangum points out, ‘The search for immortality forms almost a subgenre of this literature’ (2002: 70; see also Yoke and Hassler 1985; Clark 1995; Slusser et al. 1996). Variously read as narratives about class conflict, hubris and human desire, what is sometimes overlooked in discussions of these texts are their explicit and complex explorations of what it means to live in and across time...
Care, Generations and Reciprocity in Children’s Picturebooks in Japan
No full textTo explore the cultural discourse of ageing, illness and care through the lens of generations, this chapter analyses post-1980 Japanese picturebooks that depict generational relations and care in a familial context. Situating these books in the history of familial and social care in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century to the present, and considering the specific history and features of children’s picturebooks in Japan, the authors examine the various ways in which the books promote the traditional – generational and gendered – form of familial care, emphasising notions of duty, responsibility and reciprocity. On one level, these picturebooks suggest a relational model of care, one that accommodates rather than stigmatises dependency and an embodied, potentially vulnerable self. At the same time, however, the books contribute to a social imaginary that idealises gendered care. Furthermore, some books also suggest a paradox at the heart of familial relationality: that it can lead to anxieties around dependency on others and can restrict the ways in which autonomy is exercised
Introduction
No full textCOVID-19 brought into sharp relief the intersection of ageing, illness and care. This global pandemic exposed what we already knew: that we live in a world of global competition, not cooperation, as rich countries of the Global North competed with each other to vaccinate their populations whilst offering a derisory number of vaccines to countries with more restricted access to the drugs that save both individual lives and the wider social and economic systems within which we live. Global division, dispute and lack of cooperation then mirrored often divisive national discourses and policies that are strongly inflected by age itself
Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care
Full text linkThis collection of essays explores cultural narratives of care in the contexts of ageing and illness. It includes both text-based and practice-based contributions by leading and emerging scholars in humanistic studies of ageing. They consider care not only in film (feature and documentary) and literature (novel, short story, children’s picturebook) but also in the fields of theatre performance, photography and music. The collection has a broad geographical scope with case studies and primary texts from Europe and North America but also from Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Argentina and Mexico. The volume asks what care, autonomy and dependence may mean and how these may be inflected by social and cultural specificities. Ultimately, it invites us to reflect on our relations to others as we face the global and local challenges of both the pandemic and ageing societies
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