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Exploding the myth that the United States is on the brink of gerontological disaster, this provocative and revealing book paints a surprisingly rich and unsentimental portrait of the millions of elderly people in the U.S., and offers fresh insight into a wide range of social and political issues relating to the elderly, including health care, crime, social security, and discrimination.
The Decline of Life is an ambitious and absorbing study of old age in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on a wealth of sources - literature, correspondence, poor house and workhouse documents and diaries - Susannah Ottaway considers a wide range of experiences and expectations of age in the period, and demonstrates that the central concern of ageing individuals was to continue to live as independently as possible into their last days. Ageing men and women stayed closely connected to their families and communities, in relationships characterized by mutual support and reciprocal obligations. Despite these aspects of continuity, however, older individuals' ability to maintain their autonomy, and the nature of the support available to them once they did fall into necessity declined significantly in the last decades of the century. As a result, old age was increasingly marginalized. Historical demographers, historical gerontologists, sociologists, social historians and women's historians will find this book essential reading.
Many elderly, sick Americans who have no prospect of improved health prefer death to indefinite suffering. Others are incompetent to decide their own fate. Last Rights describes the economic and social forces that are propelling us toward controlling who dies--and when.
Theoretically grounded in classical and Renaissance writings, as well as in the work of modern theorists, this study analyzes the role of tragicomedy in the development of the English novel from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Diana of the Crossways, the Awkward Age, the Old Wives' Tale, and Ulysses are among the illustrative works discussed.
Nikki Lee Manos' introduction draws upon a wide range of historical and critical texts, from John Stuart Mill's feminist tract of 1869 to Mary Poovey's contemporary theories about gender in Victorian fiction.".
In this book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men - the world of mills and city streets, of political activism and labor strikes, of public speaking and parliamentary debates - she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England. Harman examines at length Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's North and South, Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, and Elizabeth Robins's The Convert, reading these novels in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement. She argues that these texts constitute a countertradition in Victorian fiction: neither domestic fiction nor fiction about the public "fallen" woman, these novels reveal how nineteenth-century English writers began to think about female transgression into the political sphere and about the intriguing meanings of women's public appearances.
Annotation Through an exploration of a boys' baseball league in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Philadelphia, this book reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary US public life. Protecting Home offers an account for racial accommodation in a space that was previously known for conflict and exclusion.
The Journey of Life envisions growing up and growing old as a voyage down a river flowing inexorably to the sea. With this image of the human life cycle, the author explores the historical shoreline of later life, charting its cultural forms and sounding their depths. The result is both a cultural history of aging and a contribution to public dialogue about the meaning and significance of later life. The core of the book shows how central texts and images of Northern.