The Long Life

• 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

Readership: Anyone with a scholarly or professional interest in the issue of ageing

Helen Small, Fellow in English, Pembroke College, Oxford

"...a thought-provoking, sometimes fascinating, study of old age" - Jeremy Tambling MLR

"...a landmark book and deserves to be widely read by all serious scholars of ageing. It is erudite, eclectic, carefully argued, ambitious in scope and modest in its claims...a superb contrbution to philosophy and literary criticism and will become an indispensable landmark for understanding longevity in those disciplines as well as in humanistic gerontolgy." - Thomas Cole Ageing and Society

"...a remarkable book...The range and the precision of Small's knowledge is extraordinary...an exceptionally rich and trustworthy book" - Amelie Rorty, Modern Philology

"The Long Life is an ambitious and meticulously researched work that acknowledges the difficult practical challenges and questions raised by the greying of Western society but calls upon us to become more serious in how we think about old age." - Michele Gemelos, The Review of English Studies

"...a thought-provoking and humane exploration of an unjustly neglected subject." - Henry Power The Cambridge Quarterly

"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, 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, London Review of Books

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