This handbook offers a comprehensive survey of the growing field of literary age studies and points to new directions in scholarly research. It encompasses the spectrum of critical approaches that literary age studies scholars employ, from environmental studies and postcolonial theory to critical race theory and queer studies.

1: A Smorgasbord for Literature Lovers in Search of More Age-Just Futures.- 2: Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging.- 3: Visibility of Older Black Women in Literature: Female Ancestors in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.- 4: Magical Realism and Older Age: García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende’s The Japanese Lover.- 5: Literacy Narratives and Age Identity across the Life Span.- 6: Revising the Dementia Imaginary: Disability and Age-Studies Perspectives on Graphic Narratives of Dementia.- 7: Queer Theory and Narrating Age Outside the Norm of (Re-)Productive Adulthood.- 8: Growing Older without Children: Challenging the (Re)Production Narrative for Older Women.- 9: Gerotranscendence as Literary Theory: Reading the Later Poems of Margaret Avison and W. B. Yeats.- 10: Care Noir: Before and After COVID.- 11: From Mushroom Men to Mycorrhizal Relations: Imagining Posthuman Aging and Care.- 11: Intergenerationality, Age, and Environment in Children’s Picturebooks.- 12: Age in Contemporary Drama and Performance: The Value of Considering Theatrical Time.- 13: Constructing ‘Old’ Age for Young Readers: A Digital Approach.- 14: Finding the Right Wor(l)ds: Creative Writing as Aesthetic and Existential Practice in Later Life.- 15: Creative Explorations for the Theatrical ‘Age Turn’: Toward a New Dramaturgy of Older Age.- 16: (Re)Interpreting Aging by Reading: Creativity, Wisdom, and Quality of Life in Older Age.- 17: Reading as Caring: Older Lay Readers’ Responses to the Dementia Narrative Stammered Songbook.- 18: Age and Its Metaphors.- 19: Age Identity in Old and Middle English Literature.- 20: Fantasies of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture.- 21: “A Female, & Past 60 years of Age!”: Older Age in Women’s Later Life Writing 1800-1850.- 22: American Modernity and the Narrative Arcs of Aging.- 23: Sex and the Senex: The Weight of Tradition in Desire under the Elms.- 24: Grief Representation in Late Poetry: Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13” and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters.- 25: Gerontological Poetry of the Scandinavian Welfare State.- 26: Affirmations of Aging Masculinity in Victorian Fiction: Older Men at the Margins.- 27: Aging and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies.- 28: Are Older People Still Human? On Ageist Humor.

This handbook offers a comprehensive survey of the growing field of literary age studies and points to new directions in scholarly research. Divided into four sections, the volume reflects the current conversations in the field: intersections and intersectionalities, traveling concepts, methodological innovations, and archival inquiries. It encompasses the spectrum of critical approaches that literary age studies scholars employ, from environmental studies and postcolonial theory to critical race theory and queer studies. While close reading continues to be a mainstay of literary criticism, the handbook highlights alternative tools and routes in both data elicitation and analysis. The final part of the book shows the burgeoning interest in the field from literary scholars across historical periods, extending the scope of literary age studies beyond contemporary texts. This is an essential reference work for advanced students and scholars of literary studies, gerontology, age/aging studies, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.

"The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging, edited by Valerie Lipscomb and Aagje Swinnen, is not only a deep, wide contribution to age studies in the humanities but a much-needed book. It forcefully demonstrates that the field is vibrant and evolving, by bringing together essays from the field’s most exciting thinkers and important innovators." –Devoney Looser, Arizona State University. "This lively, important collection marks a pivotal moment in age studies. Established scholars have demonstrated over the past couple decades that reading literature skillfully can help us understand aging and that understanding aging can help us read literature. Lipscomb and Swinnen have invited a new cohort of emerging scholars to join those path builders to show that the expansive field has arrived and is thriving. The resulting array of topics and approaches—broadening from close reading to socially embedded reading practices—illustrates how literary studies is at the leading edge of humanities at work in the world."  –Sally Chivers, Trent University. As the editors intend, this handbook offers a ‘smorgasbord for literature lovers,’ a sensual as well as an intellectual experience, where we as readers can understand literary gerontology as a work-in-progress by being offered a wide spectrum of research on the subject in order to position ourselves in terms of our own life-course ‘in search of a more age-just future.’ Thus, The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging offers guidance to understand literary gerontological research as an ongoing process – a pathway – to engage with the literature presented in terms of our own experience of growing old. Experiencing aging through literary texts as socially and culturally determined makes this book meaningful for all ages, and not only for lovers of literature. -Roberta Maierhofer, University of Graz, Austria.

Surveys the growing field of literary age studies Explores intersections and intersectionalities, traveling concepts, methodological innovations and archival inquiries Encourages further research on age, aging and ageism in literary works and literary practices across historical periods,