- 192 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders.
This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Doris Lessing’s Border Crossings
- 1. Horrors of the Breast: Cultural Boundaries and the Abject in The Grass is Singing
- 2. Inside and Outside Colonial Spaces: Border Crossings in Doris Lessing’s African Stories
- 3. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction
- 4. Doris Lessing’s Fantastic Children
- 5. The ‘Jane Somers’ Hoax: Aging, Gender and the Literary Marketplace
- 6. (Not Such) Great Expectations: Unmaking Maternal Ideals in The Fifth Child and We Need to Talk about Kevin
- 7. Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan ‘Third Culture Kid’
- 8. Environmental Fables? The Eco-Politics of Doris Lessing’s ‘Ifrik’ Novels
- 9. The Porous Border Between Fact and Fiction, Empathy and Identification in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft
- Afterword: Encompassing Lessing
- Index