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 who 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, looking at the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected.
In the mid-1970s, a wave of contentious radicalism swept through Italy. Groups and movements such as ‘Proletarian youth’, ‘metropolitan Indians’ and ‘the area of Autonomy’ practised new forms of activism, which were confrontational and often violent. Creative and brutal, intransigent and playful, the movements flourished briefly before being suppressed through heavy policing and political exclusion. This is a full-length study of these movements. Building on Sidney Tarrow's ‘cycle of contention’ model and drawing on a wide range of Italian materials, it tells the story of a unique group of political movements, and of their disastrous engagement with the mainstream Left. As well as shedding light on a neglected period of twentieth century history, this book offers lessons for understanding today's contentious movements (‘No Global’, ‘Black Bloc’) and today's ‘armed struggle’ groups.
Before the award of the Nobel in 2007, Doris Lessing’s reputation (in the UK at least) was looking rather shaky. Her best work behind her, she seemed to express increasingly reactionary and hectoring views and her recent writing (with some exceptions) tended to the loose, baggy and monstrous (to borrow from Henry James). 1 She appeared to be more and more distant from the cosmopolitan feel of contemporary fiction: some kind of relic from the colonial past, the Communist past, even the feminist past. Reviewers felt the need to
Doris Lessing’s late-twentieth-century fiction has often provoked and discomfited. Some readers of The Fifth Child (1988), its sequel Ben , in the World (2000) and Lessing’s 1999 novel Mara and Dann were disturbed by her appropriation of racially marked stereotypes of the animal, the primitive and the atavistic. Such imagery has controversial implications in relation to ideas about ‘race’ and nation. A secondary and related concern for readers surrounds the success or otherwise of Lessing’s choices of genre and narrative technique
In her work since 2000, Doris Lessing is concerned with different ways of writing both personal and political histories. Although this is a preoccupation that goes back at least as far as The Golden Notebook , working on the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin (published in 1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), must have heightened her interest in the question of how to narrate the past. This question is also addressed in her 1995 novel Love , Again , in which Sarah Durham, a theatre producer, writes and produces a
In 1979, Doris Lessing made the transition to new worlds, publishing Shikasta , the first novel in her Canopus in Argos: Archives quintet (1979–83) and her first novel written entirely in the speculative mode. Science fiction (SF) has always involved extrapolation, so in what ways is writing about new worlds a way of writing about our own? What is the best way of voicing the relation between the familiar and the unfamiliar? Does SF require a different voice or narration? If it does, how might that make a writer like Lessing rethink
Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English (1960) provides an excellent point of entry into the extensive body of her work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing. Issues of exile and migration are at the centre of this text and her work as a whole, suggesting the importance, but also the instability, of identity. Lessing is interested in ideas about class, nation, ‘race’ and gender, but, more importantly, in the links between these concepts and in the ways
What must strike any reader of Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook , is the extent to which its protagonist, Anna Wulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. In the first section of the conventional realist frame novel Free Women , Anna asks Molly: ‘“Well, don’t you think it’s at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don’t ever get over them?”’. 1 She mentions failed marriages, broken relationships, single parenting and years spent in the Communist Party as painful instances of ‘bad
Doris Lessing’s key novels of the period 1945–60 examine the years leading up to the Second World War and the early to middle years of the war itself. Like Lessing, her heroines, Mary Turner and Martha Quest, grow up in a British colony in Africa in this period. The umbrella title of the five-volume novel sequence focusing on Martha is Children of Violence . This is indicative not just of Lessing’s preoccupation with the war, but also of her wider analysis of its connection with the violence of the colonial encounter. The sharpest irony
7 More means less: managing overflow in science publishing Sabina Siebert, Robert Insall, and Laura M. Machesky Overflow (also referred to as surplus, excess, or overspill) is the opposite of scarcity. Yet as Czarniawska and Löfgren (2012) noted, overflow can be construed as either positive (more means better) or negative (too much of a good thing). But no matter how it is defined and whose perspective one considers, they contend, overflow must be managed. Earlier studies revealed a variety of practical definitions of overflow and a variety of managing devices
