"Recent years have seen the rise of alarming headlines warning of an imminent “grey tsunami” of aging retirees. How has old age come to possess such far-reaching ideological and ethical effects? The Aesthetics of Senescence is a field-shifting analysis of aging that begins with and extends beyond nineteenth-century British literature. Charting the traffic between fictional and medical discourses around old age, Andrea Charise shows how authors engaged with an unprecedented—and, as in our present day, hotly politicized—crisis of aging."-- Publisher's website.