This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book brings together perspectives of age and disability study to provide new insights into literary and genre history, visiting canonical authors such as Goethe, Burney, Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Beckett, and Franzen and exploring the new genre of "dementia narrative." This book introduces a new theoretical approach to cultural age studies and offers an analysis of the connection between narratology, literary theory, gender, and age studies.

Heike Hartung is an independent scholar in English Studies, associated as research fellow and university lecturer at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and the University of Graz, Austria.

1. Introduction: Concepts of Age and the "Burden Narrative" of Ageing 2. Early Stages of the Bildungsroman: Age, Gender and Illness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel 3. A Mature Genre: Ageing Processes in the Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman 4. The Limits of Development? Old Age and Dementia Narrative 5. Concluding Remarks