Approaches to old age: perspectives from the twenty-first century

In 2004, Julia Johnson edited a collection of five articles entitled Writing Old Age. In the introduction, Johnson pointed to the emergence of researchers such as Andrew Blaikie, Thomas Cole, Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, who argued that gerontology needs the humanities. Broadly speaking, these researchers advocated looking at ageing from a multitude of perspectives, extending the traditional gerontological reliance on positivist and scientific approaches. Writing Old Age exemplified this humanities-based intervention by focusing on ‘how ageing is treated in everyday texts in the form of popular fiction and auto/biography’ (Johnson, Citation2004: 2). These ‘everyday texts’ are understood as those written from observation and experience ‘unconstrained by the disciplines of empirical research’ (2). The collection of literary analyses of ageing in Writing Old Age is an example of a broader trend within English studies which has seen contributions to gerontological thinking from scholars in many disciplines, including sociolinguistics, theatre and film studies. Fourteen years after its publication, the EJES issue entitled ‘Approaches to Old Age’ aims to explore how this dialogue between English studies and ageing studies contributes to enlarge our understanding of ageing and old age.