The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life Writing Introduction: Critically Reading Dementia Narratives: Amplifying Advocacy Chapter 1: Of Wives and Daughters: The Stereotype of Caring Females Chapter 2: From a “Care Free” Distance: Sons Talking About Cultural Concepts Chapter 3: About Tradition and Triumph: Patients Popularise Dementia Narrative Chapter 4: On Reclaiming Authority: The Enabling Discourse of Alzheimer’s Disease Conclusion: Dementia Narratives Shifter of Perspectives and Values Bibliography Works Cited Index This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Despite the recent spate of books about Alzheimer’s disease by doctors patients and caregivers no other writer to my knowledge has attempted to do what the humanities scholar and research scientist Martina Zimmermann has accomplished here: an analysis of dementia narratives attuned to the medical political sociological ethical and poetic aspects that is the full human experience of living with inexorable unforgiving cognitive decline. Eileen Gillooly Columbia University USA ‘This very fine study reflects capacious knowledge and insight into a condition that as the author suggests is one of the most complex and fraught for patients and caregivers and one of the most misunderstood by policy makers. The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life Writing offers an important intervention at a critical time and deserves to meet with a wide readership.’ Jane F. Thrailkill University of North Carolina USA This is the first book length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third person caregiver and first person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer’s narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition this book argues that first patients’ articulations must be made central to dementia discourse; and second committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Martina Zimmermann has fifteen years of research and teaching experience in Pharmacology and is Privatdozentin at Goethe University Frankfurt Germany. Her scholarly interests have increasingly shifted towards the Health Humanities: with an MA in Literature and Medicine she currently researches for a book on dementia in Science Medicine and Literature of the 20th Century at King’s C ...