Doris Lessing and the Forming of History
Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger
Abstract
The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This volume views 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. Contributors provide new readings of Lessing’s work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women’s writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genr ... More
The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This volume views 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. Contributors provide new readings of Lessing’s work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women’s writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genres from realism to autobiography and science-fiction, and draw on previously unstudied archive material. The volume also explores how Lessing’s writing can provide insight into some of the issues now shaping twenty-first century scholarship – including trauma, ecocriticism, the post-human, and world literature – as they emerge as defining challenges to our own present moment in history.
Keywords:
Doris Lessing,
literary history,
women’s writing,
world literature,
the novel,
ecocriticism,
trauma
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474414432 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474414432.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Kevin Brazil, editor
University of Southampton
David Sergeant, editor
University of Plymouth
Tom Sperlinger, editor
University of Bristol
More
Less
