Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care

This 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. The authors 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 care in ageing societies.

Katsura Sako is Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. She has research interests in literary and cultural studies of the life course, ageing and gender. She has published in journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing, Feminist Review and Women: A Cultural Review. She is the co-author, with Sarah Falcus, of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019). She has held multiple research grants, including Fund for the Promotion of Joint International Research (Fostering Joint International Research) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, which funded the conference Ageing, Illness, Care in Literary and Cultural Narratives that was held at the University of Huddersfield in 2019 and provided the basis for this volume.
Sarah Falcus is a Reader in Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield. She has research interests in literary and cultural gerontology, science and speculative fiction, and children's literature. She is the co-author, with Katsura Sako, of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019). She is the co-editor, with Alison Waller, of a special issue of International Research in Children's Literature (2021) that brings together children's literature studies and ageing studies.