Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8647
Title: | Aging reimagined: Exploring older women’s attitudes to aging through reader response |
Authors: | Morrison, J |
Keywords: | Reader response;Ageing;Older women;Reading |
Issue Date: | 2013 |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Citation: | Contemporary Women’s Writing, 7(1), 1-17, 2013 |
Abstract: | Since the 1970s, concern with questions of reception within literary studies has been, at best, sporadic. This essay presents early insights from a pioneering research study, conducted in 2009–10, involving a rehabilitated form of reader-response analysis. Working with 80 volunteers (of average age 70), the study used fiction to create a space of critical reflection on the changing experience of aging. Volunteers were recruited from the Universities of the Third Age, a network of self-help cooperatives for older people: over the course of a year, they read and reflected on a series of fictional texts. This essay focuses on the responses of older women readers to one particular novel, Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Setting their varied and thought-provoking responses within the changing context of contemporary age-culture, the essay highlights some of the neglected possibilities of reader-response as a mode of analysis capable of shedding significant new light on the gendered experience of aging. |
Description: | This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author. |
URI: | http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/1/1 http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8647 |
DOI: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpr008 |
ISSN: | 1754-1484 |
Appears in Collections: | English and Creative Writing Dept of Arts and Humanities Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Notice.pdf | 39.59 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
Items in BURA are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.