Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1

Ageing and Care in the Visual Field: The Photography of Martine Franck

Shirley Jordan

Chapter 2

Improvisation and Vulnerability: Circuits of Care in Performances of Age and Ageing

Bridie Moore

Chapter 3

The Bucket List and More: Exploring Care Practices in an Australian Residential Aged Care Home through a "Narra-theatrical" Lens

Janet Gibson

Chapter 4

"Come Healing of the Spirit, Come Healing of the Mind": The Evolution of Care in Sylvain Biegeleisen's The Last Postcard and Twilight of a Life

Amir Cohen-Shalev

Chapter 5

Dementia in Familial Documentary Film: The Ethics of Representation and the Ethics of Care

Raquel Medina

Chapter 6

Re-orientating Hesitantly: Approaching the Entangled Temporalities of Cinema, Dementia, and Hong Kong from a Decolonial Viewpoint

MaoHui Deng

Chapter 7

Ghost on the Canvas: Glen Campbell's Musical Narratives of Ageing, Alzheimer's Disease, and Care

Simon Buck

Chapter 8

A Glut of Slippers: The Chronotope of Older Age in the Contemporary North American Short Story

Elizabeth Barry

Chapter 9

Old Friends: Reimagining Care Relations through Helen Garner's The Spare Room

Sally Chivers

Chapter 10

Care, Generations and Reciprocity in Children's Picturebooks in Japan

Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus