While female old age has been traditionally maligned and associated with invisibility and marginality at best, contemporary literature, both fictional and autofictional, has begun featuring increasingly complex and varied portraits of elderly female characters. The project aims to shed light on these new figurations, narratives, and explorations of interiority of the ageing and the very old, investigating their poetics of the body and of time, as well as exploring genealogical and intertextual strategies.

In her study The Coming of Age (La vieillesse), Simone de Beauvoir claims that there are no rites of passage to mark the beginning of old age or its stages, pointing to a reluctance to think about old age as a phase with its own developmental stages. But even if in contemporary literature bodily changes, frailty and loss are explored in a bold, sensual and detailed manner, the texts are not merely narratives of decline. They defy the exclusive association of novelty with the young, establishing new models of intergenerational and intertextual connection.

Lena Ekelund studied German Literature, Italian Literature and Philosophy at Hamburg University and Università degli Studi Roma 3. She completed her doctoral degree in German Literature at Hamburg University with a thesis on trauma and transmission in contemporary Jewish literature with the title Daughters’ Voices. Her research interests include narratives of trauma and postmemory, female adolescence and old age.