Within the growing body of interdisciplinary work on ageing, more attention is now paid to literary engagement with and representations of ageing, often in the form of literary gerontology. This field locates literature as part of the cultural discourses around ageing in our society. Pat Barker's work, already the subject of some gerontological attention, is important here, because her texts offer detailed representations of the ageing subject, and engage with the often disturbing challenges that ageing presents to self and social identity. This paper considers three of Pat Barker's novels –Another World (1999), Liza's England (1986/1996), and Union Street (1982) – within one of the central debates in ageing studies: how far we are aged by culture and where culture might meet the material. In these novels, ageing characters are clearly at the mercy of cultural constructions of age; nevertheless, the texts also insist on the centrality of the body, forcefully reminding us of the limits of cultural ageing. This paper argues that these novels explore the interplay between cultural and corporeal ageing, forcing the reader to acknowledge the complexities of, and unsettle any easy assumptions about, ageing subjectivity. In the process, this suggests that what fiction can offer to gerontology is, at least in part, an exploration of the ineluctability of ‘contradictions’ when it comes to ageing.

Critical concern with infantilisation practices—i.e. the tendency to treat older people as if they are dependent children—has for the most part concentrated on the negative associations between infantilisation and dependency in later life. Infantilisation is usually defined as an unwelcome imposition on older men and women who are often portrayed as relatively powerless to resist. Whilst the negative consequences of enforced infantilisation must not be ignored there are also occasions when infantilisation may be regarded as a voluntary or chosen mode of resistance on the part of older people to the decrements and external impositions of later life. The concept of infantilisation may therefore be enlarged to include modes of resistance involving processes of mutual identification of the old with the young; in certain instances even as a form of conspiracy between these two age groups against the wider society. This paper therefore pursues fictional images of such rapport as they occur in a selection of the ‘William’ stories written by Richmal Crompton during the period from 1919 up to her death in 1969, and with an appeal which continues up to the present day. The argument is that these stories of alliances between boyhood and ‘elders’ may be regarded as vivid examples (a repository of positive images) of what may be described as ‘positive infantilisation’: that is to say, of consciousness of the independence of subjective selfhood from the ageing body in the face of the misperceptions and misleading stereotypes of the ‘mature’ adult world.