Doris Lessing
Border Crossings
Published on 13. August 2009
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-0-8264-2466-2 (ISBN)
Description
This is an edited collection offering up-to-date critical coverage of a wide range of Lessing's work. 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.
Reviews / Votes
"This splendid collection of accessible, critical essays offers in-depth scrutiny of Lessing's persistent transgressing of literary, cultural, gender, and colonial boundaries. Through this lens Doris Lessing: Border Crossings appreciates the spectacular range of her work from The Grass is Singing to Alfred and Emily." - Dr Sandra Singer, University of Guelph, Canada "Doris Lessing's Border Crossings persuasively argues that Lessing's crossing of borders--cultural, political, biographic, generic and thematic--has been a persistent gesture. A valuable contribution to Doris Lessing Studies, this collection is innovative in grounding critiques of her work in British academic circles and current debates on the ideology of fictive forms, questions of authorship, commercial literary culture, aging and gender."- Professor Virginia Tiger, Department of English Chair, Rutgers University, USA Reviewed in The Year's Work in English Studies, Volume 90More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
446 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8264-2466-2 (9780826424662)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Alice Ridout is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary Women's Writing at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. She is secretary to the Contemporary Women's Writing Network. Susan Watkins is Reader in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. She is author of Twentieth Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (Palgrave, 2001), co-editor of Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth Century Novel in the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2006) and an associate editor of the journal Contemporary Women's Writing (Oxford). She was also editor of a special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature on Doris Lessing (March 2008).
Content
Introduction, Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; 1. Not Just Environmental Fables: The Eco-Politics of Lessing's 'Ifrikan' Novels, Fiona Becket, University of Leeds, UK; 2. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Metacriticism, Nick Bentley, University of Keele, UK; 3. Horrors of the Breast: A Kristevan Reading of The Grass is Singing, Edith Frampton, San Diego State University, USA; 4. Landscape and the Anti-Pastoral Critique in Lessing's African Stories, Pat Louw, University of Zululand, SA; 5. "Betwixt and Between": Fact and Fiction, History and Literature in Doris Lessing's The Cleft, Phyllis Perrakis, University of Ottawa, CA; 6. Ideals and Institutions: Remaking the Maternal in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and Other Texts, Ruth Robbins, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; 7. Lessing's Fabulous Children, Roberta Rubenstein, American University, USA; 8. The 'Jane Somers' Hoax: Doris Lessing, Gender, Aging, and the Cult of the (Young) Celebrity Woman Writer, Susan Watkins, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; 9. Doris Lessing's Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan 'Third Culture Kid', Alice Ridout, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; Index.