Welcome to Middle Age!: (And Other Cultural Fictions) Hardcover - 1998 - 1st Edition

First line

Looking over the vast explosion of midlife discourse, both popular and scholarly, that has become such a feature of seventies', eighties', and nineties' common sense in the United States, a cultural inquirer cannot help but observe that the boom has created as well as targeted an audience for the messages.

From the rear cover

The idea of "midlife", and particularly the decline associated with the period, has become widespread in Euro-American culture. The symptoms of middle age are equally pervasive: back pain, mortgage payments, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This pathology of midlife has even recently begun to be exported to all territories in the contemporary world system; people around the world are being invited to change the way they think about mature adulthood and to adopt the middle-class American version of middle age. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) is a welcome antidote to this epidemic, providing a refreshing examination of both this received idea of midlife and of alternative "fictions" that operate in cultures where middle age does not even constitute a life stage.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 06/15/1998, Page 1686