Winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2008
Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism 2008
TLS Christmas Pick 2007
The Long Life
Helen Small
Price: £25.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-922993-2
Publication date: 20 September 2007
320 pages, 234x156 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - 'Helen concludes that we will understand old age best when we view it not as a problem apart but always connected into larger philosophic and, I may add, moral considerations. She opened my eyes: I was blind and now I see.' - Peter H. Millard, Age and Aging
- 'a book philosophers, among others, should read, for it contains deftly handled engagements with some of the most formidable figures in their canon... But it also moves confidently among the classics of literature showing throughout how close reading is inseparable from hard thinking.' - Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement
- 'This is an ambitious, subtle and highly original study.' - The Scotsman
- 'The Long Life is an accessible, ground-breaking book and one likely to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be old and the growing proportion of old to young.' - Helen Peacocke, The Oxford Times
- 'Small...deserves to feel good, for she has argued tirelessly, written an impressively researched book, and commanded the interest of sceptics more than twice her age.' - Frank Kermode, LRB
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| Description | | - The first major study of old age in philosophy and literature since Beauvoir's The Coming of Age - essential reading for anyone interest in old age as a personal or public matter of interest
- Exceptional range: from Plato through to contemporary theories of social justice and evolutionary science
- Broadens the terrain of debate regarding the greying of society, beyond the familiar 'representations of old age' and the standard considerations of social policy
- Moves well beyond the philosophical arguments and texts commonly studied by literary critics
| The Long Life
invites the reader to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear
through works by Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, to more recent writing by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee.
Helen Small argues that if we want to
understand old age, we have to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a person, to have a life, to have (or lead) a good life, to be part of a just society. What did Plato mean when he suggested that old age was the best place from which to practice philosophy - or Thomas Mann when he defined old age as the best time to be a writer - and were they right? If we think, as Aristotle did,
that a good life requires the active pursuit of virtue, how will our view of later life be affected? If we think that lives and persons are unified, much as stories are said to be unified, how will our thinking about old age differ from that of someone who thinks that lives and/or persons can be strongly discontinuous? In a just society, what constitutes a fair distribution of limited resources
between the young and the old? How, if at all, should recent developments in the theory of evolutionary senescence alter our thinking about what it means to grow old?
This is a groundbreaking book, deep as well as broad, and likely to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be old, and the growing proportion of
the old to the young.
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Readership: Anyone with a scholarly or professional interest in the issue of ageing
| Contents |
Introduction
1.
The Platonic Threshhold (Plato and Thomas Mann)
2.
On Seeing the End (Aristotle and King Lear)
3.
Narrative Unity of Lives (Epicureanism, the Narrative View, Saul Bellow)
4.
The Power of Choosing (Prudential Life Planning, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith)
5.
Where Self-Interest Ends (Derek Parfit and Balzac)
6.
The Bounded Life (Adorno's Metaphysics, Dickens, Beckett)
7.
Now or Never (Bernard Williams, J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth)
8.
Evolved Senescence (Evolutionary theory, Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue)
Conclusion
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Helen Small, Fellow in English, Pembroke College, Oxford
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and month of publication, was as accurate as
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