Description
Here are extracts from the stories of eight British people born between 1921 and 1943 who record and celebrate on a personal level various radical and important shifts in both their own lives and British culture during the last century. The stories are part of the research project Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing centered at Brunel University London. Four representatives each of the interwar generation and the wartime generation present such perspectives as I never stopped learning all by life, rushing about, life is better than I could ever have imagined, and an apprentice old dear. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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The combined effect of the welfare state and medical advances means that more people now live longer lives than ever before in history. As a consequence, the experience of ageing has been transformed. Yet our cultural and social perceptions of ageing remain governed by increasingly dated images and narratives.Growing Old with the Welfare State challenges these stereotypes by bringing together eight previously unpublished stories of ordinary British people born between 1925 and 1945 to show contemporary ageing in a new light. These biographical narratives, six of which were written as part of the Mass Observation Project, reflect on and compare the experience of living in two post-war periods of social change, after the first and second world wars. In doing so, these stories, along with their accompanying contextual chapters, provide a valuable and accessible resource for social historians, and expose both historical and contemporary views of age and ageing that challenge modern assumptions.
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