The Australian Reifungsroman
Reading women’s ageing in Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002768 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yuanhang Liu (0000-0002-6964-6577, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 677-691 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-15 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00219894211032064 |
| OpenAlex | W3199983490 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
Women’s ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women’s experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women. This article aims to acknowledge the existence of the Reifungsroman in Australian literature while addressing questions around how this genre is employed in the Australian context, in order to actively engage with the topic of women’s ageing. Drawing on literary gerontology, this article examines Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (2000) and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide (1999) from a feminist perspective, focusing on the literary representations of ageing women offered by these novels. In so doing, this article contends that the Australian Reifungsroman unsettles the dominant ideas about women’s ageing as negative and declining. Indeed, narratives such as these help to articulate ageing women’s agency by reconstructing new images of older womanhood
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Identity (music · Life writing · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Perfection · Political science · Reading (process · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Aging and Gerontology Research · Gender Studies · History · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Law · Philosophy · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |