This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary.

Michaela Schrage-Früh is lecturer in German at NUI Galway. She is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian (2004) and Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination (2016). She has authored numerous articles and co-edited several collections on representations of gender and ageing in literature and culture.

Tony Tracy is lecturer in Film and Media Studies at NUI Galway. His research centres on film history and Irish cinema with a particular interest in masculinities. He has authored numerous articles and co-edited a number of collections including Irish Masculinity and Popular Culture: Tiger Tales (2014) and John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director (2010).

1. Introduction: Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture

Michaela Schrage-Früh and Tony Tracy

DRAMA

2. Taking the "Black Stick": Ageing Husbands and Fathers in the Plays of J. M. Synge and Teresa Deevy

Mária Kurdi

3. "Are all the monks old men?" Ageing and the Male Monastic Community in Brian Friel's The Enemy Within

Giovanna Tallone

4. Father Ireland on Stage: Representations of Social Change and Ageing Masculinities in Crisis

Ciara L. Murphy

POETRY

5. Poetics at the Limit: Embodiment, Masculinities, and Ageing in Samuel Beckett's Early Poetry Collection Echo's Bones

Heike Hartung

6. Masculinity, Ageing, and Midlife Crisis in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Paul Durcan

Anne Karhio

7. Not Sailing to Byzantium: Aged Masculinities and Latour's Matters of Concern in the Late Works of Irish Male Poets

Katarzyna Ostalska

FICTION

8. "That the Youth May Throw Us Aside": Fatherhood, Ageing Masculinities, and the Politics of Insecurity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction

Loic Wright

9. Stuck in the Old Times: A Male-character Analysis on Three Irish Novels Through Corpus Stylistics

Cassandra S. Tully

10. 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-Früh

11. "Caught suddenly by the land shifting": Ageing Masculinity and Rural Ireland in Recent Irish Short Fiction

Orlaith Darling

12. "A bridge to nowhere": Arrested Development, Trauma, Liminality, and the Ageing Irish Exile in Bernard MacLaverty's Midwinter Break

Clare Brannigan

13. "Shades of Masculinities": Midlife and Caring Masculinity in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones

Brenda O'Connell

14. Colm Tóibín and Henry James: Portrait of an Ageing Master

Heather Ingman

VISUAL CULTURE

15. Seán Keating's Ireland - the Land of Old Men

Katarzyna Kociöek

16. Ageing Masculinities and Irish Traditional Music on Screen

Verena Commins and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

17. Changing the Picture: Older Men's Responses to Media Representations of Ageing in an Irish Context

Margaret O'Neill and Áine Ní Léime