This volume explores the theme of age and aging, uniquely combining personal reflections from literature professors with sound scholarly analysis of a range of fiction and poetry. Bringing together leading literary scholars, this collection of essays covers a range of writers and texts, representing both the canon and new voices. By combining the chapter authors' expertise as literary and cultural critics with their own responses to novels, short stories and poems, the book offers new insights into the life trajectories made available to fiction and poetry readers through compelling narrative and vivid literary representation.

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, PA, USA. He has published a number of edited volumes with Palgrave, including Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom (with Sue Norton, 2022), Victorian Environmental Nightmares (with Ronald D. Morrison, 2019), Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (with Ronald D. Morrison, 2017) and Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (with Jen Cadwallader, 2017).

Sue Norton is Lecturer of English at Technological University Dublin, Ireland.  She is co-editor and contributor to Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom (Palgrave 2022), with Laurence W. Mazzeno.  She is widely published in books and journals on literary studies.