Aging Studies and Ecocriticism
Interdisciplinary Encounters
Edited by Nassim W. Balestrini; Julia Hoydis; Anna-Christina Kainradl and Ulla Kriebernegg
Contributions by Nassim W. Balestrini; Julia Hoydis; Anna-Christina Kainradl; Ulla Kriebernegg; Albert Banerjee; Simon Dickel; Katrina Dunn; Jade E. French; Michaela Schrage-Früh; Silvia Gerlsbeck; Stephen Hahn; Julia Henderson; Christian Lenz; Tina-Karen Pusse; Núria Mina-Riera; Adrian Tait and Peter J. Whitehouse
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.