“A brilliant contribution to the medical humanities on aging, exquisitely written and brimming with discovery.” —Stephen Katz, author of Disciplining Old Age

Recent years have seen the rise of alarming headlines warning of an imminent “grey tsunami” of aging retirees. How has old age come to possess such far-reaching ideological and ethical effects? The Aesthetics of Senescence is a field-shifting analysis of aging that begins with and extends beyond nineteenth-century British literature. Charting the traffic between fictional and medical discourses around old age, Andrea Charise shows how authors engaged with an unprecedented—and, as in our present day, hotly politicized—crisis of aging.

“A must-read book for scholars, demographers, historians, health care professionals, and policy makers who get that aging—free of ageism—is our rightful destiny.” —Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks

Andrea Charise is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Center for Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. An award-winning educator and researcher of literary studies (and recipient of the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature), she has twenty years of work experience as a medical researcher, primarily in geriatrics. This is her first book.
 

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