This book examines narratives of dementia in contemporary literary texts, studying what is now a pressing issue with deep political, economic, and social implications for many ageing societies. As part of the increasing visibility of dementia in social and cultural life, these narratives pose ethical, aesthetic, and political questions about subjectivity, agency, and care that help us to interrogate the cultural discourse of dementia. Contemporary Narratives of Dementia is a seminal book that offers a sustained examination of a wide range of literary narratives, from auto/biographies and detective fiction, to children’s books and comic books. With its wide-reaching theoretical and critical scope, its comparative dimension, and its inclusion of multiple genres, this book is important for scholars engaging with studies of dementia and ageing in diverse disciplines. Sarah Falcus is a Reader in Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She has research interests in contemporary women’s writing, feminism and literary gerontology. She is the co-director of the Dementia and Cultural Narrative (DCN) network. Katsura Sako is an Associate Professor of English, at Keio University, Japan. Her main field of research is in post-war/contemporary British literature, and she has particular interests in gender, ageing and illness. She is a member of the steering committee of the DCN network.

Reconsidering Dementia Narratives explores the role of narrative in developing new ways of understanding, interacting with, and caring for people with dementia. It asks how the stories we tell about dementia – in fiction, life writing and film – both reflect and shape the way we think about this important condition. Highlighting the need to attend to embodied and relational aspects of identity in dementia, the study further outlines ways in which narratives may contribute to dementia care, while disputing the idea that the modes of empathy fostered by narrative necessarily bring about more humane care practices. This cross-medial analysis represents an interdisciplinary approach to dementia narratives which range across auto/biography, graphic narrative, novel, film, documentary and collaborative storytelling practices. The book aims to clarify the limits and affordances of narrative, and narrative studies, in relation to an ethically driven medical humanities agenda through the use of case studies. Answering the key question of whether dementia narratives align with or run counter to the dominant discourse of dementia as ‘loss of self’, this innovative book will be of interest to anyone interested in dementia studies, ageing studies, narrative studies in health care, and critical medical humanities.

This collection of essays explores cultural narratives of care in the contexts of ageing and illness. It includes both text-based and practice-based contributions by leading and emerging scholars in humanistic studies of ageing. The authors consider care not only in film (feature and documentary) and literature (novel, short story, children’s picturebook) but also in the fields of theatre performance, photography and music. The collection has a broad geographical scope, with case studies and primary texts from Europe and North America but also from Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Argentina and Mexico. The volume asks what care, autonomy and dependence may mean and how these may be inflected by social and cultural specificities. Ultimately, it invites us to reflect on our relations to others as we face the global and local challenges of care in ageing societies.

Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres – novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs – represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events – ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions – all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia.

Focusing mainly on case studies from Australia and the United States of America, this book considers how people with dementia represent themselves and are represented in ‘theatre of the real’ productions and care home interventions, assessing the extent to which the ‘right kind’ of dementia story is being affirmed or challenged. It argues that this type of story — one of tragedy, loss of personhood, biomedical deficit, and socio-economic ‘crisis — produces dementia and the people living with it, as much as biology does. It proposes two novel ideas. One is that the ‘gaze’ of theatre and performance offers a reframing of some of the behaviours and actions of people with dementia, through which deficit views can be changed to ones of possibility. The other is that, conversely, dementia offers productive perspectives on ’theatre of the real’. Scanning contemporary critical studies about and practices of ‘theatre of the real’ performances and applied theatre interventions, the book probes what it means when certain ‘theatre of the real’ practices (specifically verbatim and autobiographical) interact with storytellers considered, culturally, to be ‘unreliable narrators’. It also explores whether autobiographical theatre is useful in reinforcing a sense of ‘self’ for those deemed no longer to have one. With a focus on the relationship between stories and selves, the book investigates how selves might be rethought so that they are not contingent on the production of lucid self-narratives, consistent language, and truthful memories.

This volume seeks to bring readers to a deeper understanding of contemporary cultural and social configurations of Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing 21st-century U.S. novels in which the disease plays a key narrative role. Via analysis of selected works, Garrigós considers how the erasure of memory in a person with Alzheimer’s affects our idea of the identity of that person and their sense of belonging to a group. Starting out from three different types of memory (individual, social and cultural), the study focuses on the narrative strategies that authors use to configure how the disease is perceived and represented. This study is significant not only because of what the texts reveal about those with Alzheimer’s, but also for what they say about us - about the authors and readers who are producing and consuming these texts, about how we see this disease, and what our attitudes to it say about contemporary U.S. society.

Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.