Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature

This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book brings together perspectives of age and disability study to provide new insights into literary and genre history, visiting canonical authors such a

Heike Hartung is an independent scholar in English Studies, associated as research fellow and university lecturer at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and the University of Graz, Austria.

1. Introduction: Concepts of Age and the "Burden Narrative" of Ageing 2. Early Stages of the Bildungsroman: Age, Gender and Illness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel 3. A Mature Genre: Ageing Processes in the Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman 4. The Limits of Development? Old Age and Dementia Narrative 5. Concluding Remarks