The cover is taken from a wall in rural China, with the top representing “a daughter fighting a wild animal to save her father,” and the bottom “an officer who gives up his appointment to look for his mother.” You state that they represent “two tesserae in an ideal female life span mosaic.” Does this also make a statement about the representation of one woman as many characters?

The fact that most people become aware of their own age identity only when they perceive themselves as “aging” leads us to associate age studies with later life. Age studies are actually concerned with the life span and intergenerational relations as well as with later-life issues. Although “aging-conscious” women are the protagonists of the narratives that are analyzed in my book, their relations with other age groups are a central concern. Since age is the basis of character identity in these novels, the stories may focus on the inner development of individual characters through various life stages or on relationships within same-age communities or across generations. This means that age or generational identities may be experienced within a single character or through the relational mirrors of family or the larger society. Age may also function as a powerful agent for deconstructing character identity. The dynamics of disinvestment and reinvestment trigger processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of private and public identity. Furthermore, the fact that from a postmodern perspective the self is never identical to itself through time implies that a single character may be approached as multiple characters at different life stages, or that young characters may incorporate older characters as their future selves.

You mention how your research broadened your critical consciousness and affected your analyses of the novels. What affected you the most in your research for Women of a Certain Age?

My research has brought me in contact with disciplines that are beyond my fields of interest and competence and employ critical languages and methodologies that are very different from those I am used to converse with. I am thinking, for example, of myself as the only humanities scholar among many health scientists and professionals in the Steering Committee of my university’s Center of Excellence on Aging.

In the introduction you discuss your interest in the relationship between the text and the cultural imaginary. Could you expand on the concept of the cultural imaginary?

By cultural imaginary I mean the ways a culture represents itself both “prospectively” and “retrospectively.” In a life-course perspective that dialogues with the literary imagination, time is, as feminist age scholar Kathleen Woodward points out, “prospective as well as retrospective,” and emerging or projected age scenarios interrogate aging experiences of the past.

Much of your preliminary research focuses on American research. Is the contribution of studying literature through gerontology, mainly an American one?

Most of the research in humanistic gerontology was conducted in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.

Does the trend of contemporary life-course narratives in Italy only deal with the female perspective?

Yes, mostly, since women’s life courses have been affected by the demographic and cultural revolutions of the last century much more significantly than men’s. The possibility of an Italian woman outliving her reproductive years has opened up a sort of uncharted territory, potentially subversive in its “anachronism” and particularly fertile for the literary imagination. Moreover, female genealogies and cultural transmission to new generations of women are among the top concerns of contemporary Italian feminism.

–Lorna Marie McManus