"Yes, that's me singing to myself": Jackie Kay's "These are not my clothes" as a Self-Affirming Narrative of Care in Old Age.

Fictional stories set in care homes have increased in the last decades and, with them, the perspectives from which care homes are constructed and represented have become diversified. Care home stories. Aging, disability, and long-term residential care.

Successful ageing and the spectre of the fourth age in the Netflix TV series Grace and Frankie.

With its potential to engage a large audience and mark emerging social tendencies and with the rich narrative space that the seriality can bring, TV series can be a valuable cultural site through which to explore ageing as an experience in time. The Netflix's longest-running TV series Grace and Frankie (2015-2022) exhibits such potential, bringing together ageing and friendship into the popular cultural domain. Set in the contemporary US, the show closely follows two over-70, newly divorced, female protagonists and friends, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin).

Ageing without remembering: Fantasy, memory and loss in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.

In his most recent novel, The Buried Giant (2015), Ishiguro presents an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a Britain afflicted by a mist that makes everyone forget not only their common historical past but also their own life experiences and memories. By focusing on the journey of the two elderly and increasingly frail protagonists within a fantastic, neomedieval world, the novel challenges the chronometric and future-oriented model of time in which youth is an asset and old age inevitably a burden. Related to this, the novel interrogates the model of generational succession as straightforward renewal and progress, instead positing a cyclical movement through which the mistakes of past generations are repeated once and again.

Exploring Care Through Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van: Extending Meanings, Encountering Otherness.

Background And Objectives: This article explores care relationships as they are represented within "The Lady in the Van," a sequence of interconnected texts by English writer Alan Bennett.

Research And Methods: By mainly taking the memoirs and film of the same title as primary sources, and in the light of key concepts related to care theory and aging studies, the article shows the extent to which Bennett goes beyond the accustomed portrayal of domestic relationships of care by placing himself as the protagonist of a narrative-and a relationship-in which caring for and about a complete stranger entails coming to terms with both social and personal issues.

Discussion: The article examines the ways in which the relationship of care portrayed by Bennett entails exploring forms of Otherness that both caring and aging unveil, which are related to age, gender, and sexuality, and that in Bennett's narrative end up favoring a dialogue of which the author himself is the main beneficiary.

The Multiple Faces of Aging Into Wisdom in Julian Barnes's The Lemon Table.

In The Lemon Table, published in 2004, Barnes introduces 11 short stories with old characters as their main protagonists, a few of them actually close to death. It is precisely their age together with their physical frailty, in most cases, that makes the protagonists reflect on wisdom; that is, what life has taught them and to what extent they can actually contribute to pass on to their knowledge to future generations. Neither Barnes nor the characters within his short stories believe in a straightforward connection between old age and serenity, with wisdom as its ultimate result.

Exploring the path to death through Barnes's older characters: Between irony and melancholic meditation.

This article aims at analysing four of Julian Barnes's novels with protagonists either entering or in their old age in order to discern to what extent conceptions of ageing, old age and death are depicted in Barnes's fiction and develop throughout his writing career. Barnes's memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) will also be central in the discussion, since, in it, the author reflects on conceptions of old age and death from different philosophers and authors intermingling them with his own personal experience and that of his family, specially his parents. For Barnes, death represents another part of life, even though he himself has confessed to have been obsessed with death since his early adolescence.

The complexities of female aging: Four women protagonists in Penelope Lively's novels.

Penelope Lively is a well-known contemporary British author who has published a good number of novels and short stories since she started her literary career in her late thirties. In her novels, Lively looks at the lives of contemporary characters moulded by specific historical as well as cultural circumstances. Four of her novels, published from 1987 to 2004, present middle-aged and older women as their main protagonists.

Challenging stereotypes? The older woman in the TV series Brothers & Sisters.

The TV series, Brothers & Sisters, broadcast from 2006 to 2011 by ABC (USA) and a year later by Channel 4 (UK) with quite high audience rates, starts when the patriarchal figure, William Walker, dies of a heart attack and two female figures around their sixties come center stage: his wife, Nora Walker, and his long-term lover, Holly Harper. Once the patriarchal figure disappears, the female characters regain visibility by entering the labor market and starting relationships with other men. In that sense, both protagonists experience aging as a time in which they are increasingly freed from social and family constraints.

The Loneliness of the Aging in Two Contemporary Novels.

Purpose Of The Study: In The Loneliness of the Dying (1985), sociologist Norbert Elias claims that "aging" and "old age" have become frightening, almost taboo terms in Western society because death is increasingly made invisible in advanced societies. Years ago, death was a part of life and the dead were granted the honor of passing away in their homes, surrounded by their communities; in present-day society, most have never seen a corpse and are ignorant of anything related to death.

Design And Methods: According to Elias, the consequences of this distancing from death have been a distancing from the aging process as a whole.

Narrating ageing: deconstructing negative conceptions of old age in four contemporary English novels.

Characters in their late sixties, seventies and even eighties have become the main protagonists and narrators in contemporary fiction. Narratives of ageing not only allow the reader to go into deep confines of an ageing protagonist, they also offer a detailed account of how these protagonists as well as the society around them deal with an increasing reality within the Western world, namely, that a demographic change is taking place and, thus, social and individual conceptions related to old age and ageing need to be revised and redefined. Novels such as Pat Barker's The Century's Daughter, Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers and Rose Tremain's The Cupboard invite the reader to explore the ageing process, both at an individual and social level, through the stories their main protagonists narrate to a member of a younger generation.