Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture / Michaela Schrage-Fr�uh and Tony Tracy -- Taking the "black stick": ageing husbands and fathers in the plays of J.M. Synge and Teresa Deevy / M�aria Kurdi -- "Are all the monks old men?" Ageing and the male monastic community in Brian Friel's The enemy within / Giovanna Tallone -- Father Ireland on stage : representations of social change and ageing masculinities in crisis / Ciara L. Murphy -- Poetics at the limit : embodiment, masculinities, and ageing in Samuel Beckett's early poetry collection Echo's Bones / Heike Hartung -- Masculinity, ageing, and midlife crisis in the poetry of Paul Muldoon and Paul Durcan / Anne Karhio -- Not sailing to Byzantium : aged masculinities and Latour's Matters of concern in the late works of Irish male poets / Katarzyna Ostalska -- "That the youth may throw us aside" : fatherhood, ageing masculinities, and the politics of insecurity in mid-twentieth-century Irish fiction / Loic Wright -- Stuck in the old times : a male-character analysis on three Irish novels through corpus stylistics / Cassandra S. Tully -- Uncanny reflections : older widowers in John Banville's The sea, Sebastian Barry's The secret scripture and Anne Griffin's When all is said / Michaela Schrage-Fr�uh -- "Caught suddenly by the land shifting" : ageing masculinity and rural Ireland in recent Irish short fiction / Orlaith Darling -- "A bridge to nowhere" : arrested development, trauma, liminality, and the ageing Irish exile in Bernard MacLaverty's Midwinter break / Clare Brannigan -- "Shades of masculinities" : midlife and caring masculinity in Mike McCormack's Solar bones / Brenda O'Connell -- Colm T�oib�in and Henry James : portrait of an ageing master / Heather Ingman -- Se�an Keating's Ireland - the land of old men / Katarzyna Kocio�ek -- Ageing masculinities and Irish traditional music on screen / Verena Commins and M�eabh N�i Fhuarth�ain -- Changing the picture : older men's responses to media representations of ageing in an Irish context / Margaret O'Neill and �Aine N�i L�eime.

"This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men's embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Se�an Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O'Brien, John Banville, Colm T�oib�in, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the essays in this collection attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression"--