Doris Lessing: Border Crossings

Description

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.

Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She is Vice-President of the Doris Lessing Society and book reviews editor for Contemporary Women's Writing. 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).

"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 90