Narratives of Old Age: Decline, Burden, and Defiance in Representations of Care Home Residents in Contemporary Slovenian Literature

In cultural age studies, we have at least three major cultural narratives of aging in the Western societies: the decline narrative, the burden narrative, and the defiance narrative. As aging studies scholars and literary gerontologists have shown, these cultural narratives can be found in literary works across various linguistic and cultural contexts (e.g., Barry & Skagen and Falcus, Hartung & Medina). This paper explores literary representations of old age and aging in three Slovenian books, all with the care home as a setting or a theme. Literary works depicting care homes and care home residents, touching upon topics such as aging, institutionalization, memory, isolation, fall under the care home genre. The selected and analysed works in chronological order are the novel Dom dom (Home Home, 2008) by Tone Partljič, the short story collection Kavni krog (Coffee Circle, 2021) by Barbara Hanuš, and the crime novel, Umor v domu za ostarele? (Murder in a Care Home?, 2022), by Vito Komac.