Putting Age in its Place

How are long-term residential care and the construction of late-life identities connected in North American film and fiction? Through close readings of works by Margaret Atwood, Joan Barfoot, Oscar Casares, John Mighton, and several others, Ulla Kriebernegg explores how the setting at the nexus of home, hospital, hotel, and prison functions in the newly emerging genre of the care home novel. What role does this setting play for the narrative construction of old age, and what hopes and fears are revealed? Kriebernegg argues that the spatiality of aging needs to be included into discussions of late life agency and care in the face of vulnerability.