Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's ...global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors—white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies—reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African. Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order.
Doris Lessing Watkins, Susan
2013., 20130719, 2010, 2010-08-01, 2013-07-19
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This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced ...will be her final novel. Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing's relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter; it makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's continued interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race and the connections between them. The book examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing's work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.
This volume views Doris Lessing's writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical ...changes through which she lived.
Doris Lessing's recent centenary brought opportunities to look at her works with fresh eyes. This is also the case with Lessing's interest in education (Cairnie 2008; Sperlinger 2017), especially ...that of children in their transition to youth. This paper argues that this was an interest with which Lessing consistently concerned herself in both her fiction and non-fiction writings. Using the corpus of her African short stories as a primary reference framework, this paper studies "Flavours of Exile" (1957), a short story in which a family's vegetable garden becomes a learning space for informal experimentation. The story is used by Lessing as a platform to raise her concerns about the education of the female subject in the historical context of decolonisation. Keywords: Doris Lessing, African short stories, colonialism, education, garden. La reciente celebracion del centenario de Doris Lessing ha supuesto la oportunidad de dedicar nuevas miradas a su obra. Esto es asi con respecto a las aportaciones criticas existentes sobre el interes de Lessing por la educacion (Cairnie 2008; Sperlinger 2017), sobre todo en ninos y ninas en procesos de transicion hacia la adolescencia. Este articulo muestra que, para Lessing, dicho interes es constante y se observa a lo largo de su obra, tanto de ficcion como de no ficcion. Tomando el corpus de los relatos africanos como marco principal de referencia, este articulo estudia "Flavours of Exile" (1957), un relato donde el huerto familiar se transforma en espacio informal de experimentacion, y es para Lessing un vehiculo para dar paso a sus preocupaciones por la educacion del sujeto femenino en un contexto historico de descolonizacion. Palabras clave: Doris Lessing, relatos africanos, colonialismo, educacion, jardin.
Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times wrestles with the ghosts that continue to haunt our most pressing twenty-first-century concerns: how to reconceive imprisoning conceptions of sexuality and ...gender, how to define terrorism, how to locate the personal, and how to write on race and colonialism in an ever-slippery postmodern world. This collection of essays clearly establishes Lessing’s importance as a unique and necessary voice in contemporary literature and life.
In tracing the evolution in Lessing’s representations of controversial subjects, this volume shows how new cultural and political contexts demand new solutions. Focusing on Lessing’s experiments with genre and on the ramifications of narrative itself, the collection asks readers to reformulate some of their most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and their relation to it.
Contributors to Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times assess Lessing’s vision of the past and its relevance for the future by revisiting texts from the beginning of her career onward while at the same time probing previous interpretations of these works. These reassessments reveal Lessing’s continued role as a gadfly who, in disrupting rigid constructions of right and wrong and of good and evil, forces her readers to move beyond “you are damned, we are saved” narratives. As rationales such as these continue to permeate global venues, Lessing’s oeuvre becomes increasingly relevant.
Womens Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and ...critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twe.
Doris Lessing celebrates the realist, committed novel and laments its absence in much of modern literature. Her theory of literature emanates from an understanding of good and evil and has an ...instructive function. Accordingly, she admires nineteenth-century realist novelists and commends their efforts to document and question unjust social practices. Based on Lessing's literary credo titled "The Small Personal Voice," in this paper I shall explicate her notion of literary commitment and regard it as a counter to literary aestheticism, relating her idea of committedness to her African past and evaluating her theory of art articulated in the essay from the Islamic viewpoint.
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