WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a TALK: "Epistolary (and diaristic) lessons on old age and ageing in the Long Eighteenth Century" by dr Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon (Friday, April 29, 13:15-14:15).
April 29, 13:15-14:15
The talk will take place in AULA HELIODORI AND LIVE ON MS TEAMS
ABSTRACT
In his seventeenth-century A discourse concerning old-age tending to the instruction, caution and comfort of aged persons Richard Steele defines old age thus: “For the First, we must come to a right Notion of Old-age, partly by its Name.(…) But the most usual and proper word for it denotes a Person, who hath one Foot in the Grave, that is half dead already”. Despite such a thanatological orientation, Steele’s treatise is actually a multi-layered and much more positive study of ageing and senescence. Steele’s narrative is part and parcel of a long cultural, religious, social and medical study of what it means to age and, in particular, be old, which, eventually, was termed humanist(ic) gerontology. My inquiry will use the methodology of both age studies and humanist(ic) gerontology, focusing, however, on autonarratives on embodied experiences of ageing into old age as seen in selected English ego-documents, mainly letters (and, incidentally, diaries), written during the Long Eighteenth Century. The ultimate agenda of the presentation will be to investigate the geragogic function of such ego-documents, showing them as paraliterary conduct manuals, teaching others and the authors themselves what it truly means to age and be old.
Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics. Since 2015 her research has been devoted to old age and ageing as defined and (re)presented in English culture and literature, especially between the Restoration and the 1800s. She has published on codes and books of conduct, theatre and drama as well as old age. Her most recent publications include two edited collections, Autumnal Faces: Old Age in British and Irish Dramatic Narratives (2017) and ‘Experienc’d Age knows what for Youth is fit’?: Generational and Familial Conflict in British and Irish Drama and Theatre (2019), and a monograph, 'And Yet I Remember’: Ageing and Old(er) Age in English Drama between 1660 and the 1750s (2019) which concluded her research grant from the National Science Centre.