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. Naipauls 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 Rhyss
Late Short Stories
4 Nśria Mina-Riera: Embodying Age(ing) in the Non-Human World in Lorna
Croziers Poetry
5 Simon Dickel: Beyond Reproductive Futurism: Harold and Maudes 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 Besants 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
Nassim Winnie Balestrini is professor of American studies and intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria.
Julia Hoydis is professor of English literature at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Anna-Christina Kainradl is pre-doctoral researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, Austria.
Ulla Kriebernegg is professor in cultural aging and care studies and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, Austria.
