Edited by Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose
“A tribute to Lessing’s recognized stature and continuing vitality and power to surprise and provoke. The range of response represented in these essays is impressive, and they admirably suggest the development of her work through its many phases.”
Margaret Drabble
Long neglected by the academic world because of her rejection of belletristic values and resistance to convenient literary taxonomy, Doris Lessing has nonetheless built an international following of serious, dedicated readers. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by the multiple dimensions of Lessing’s work, Kaplan and Rose have gathered eleven essays that address her artistic, philosophical, political, and psychological complexity, and so provide a welcome introduction to the extraordinary depth and diversity of this important contemporary novelist.
Lessing has been described as an “alchemical” writer, in that her work is directed toward changing people’s lives and perceptions rather than simply recording experience. Accordingly, the contributors examine her various postures and tactics for the purpose of discovering how the alchemical elements inform her various personae. Frederick C. Stern discusses Lessing’s commitment to radical humanist thought, while Carey Kaplan examines how Lessing’s imperialist past has shaped her futuristic fiction. Elizabeth Abel offers a feminist interpretation of the pattern of brother-sister incest in Lessing’s work, showing how Lessing has established Antigone as a female alternative to the Oedipal myth of male incest. Particularly insightful is Eve Bertelsen’s report of her interview with Lessing, demonstrating how Lessing’s often evasive style of adversarial dialogue works in concert with her refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed by academic analysis.
For those readers new to her work, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival will serve as a useful introduction to Lessing’s concerns and techniques. Those who have long admired her writing will find in this collection new keys to understanding Lessing’s philosophical, political, and psychological complexity.
Carey Kaplan is associate professor and chairperson of the English Department at Saint Michael’s College. More info →
Ellen Cronan Rose is associate professor in the Department of Humanities & Communications at Drexel University. More info →
Retail price:
$29.95 ·
Save 20% ($23.96)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Click or tap on a subject heading to sign up to be notified when new related books come out.
Hardcover
978-0-8214-0891-9
Retail price: $29.95,
S.
Release date: May 1988
187 pages
·
6 × 9 in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4484-9
Release date: May 1988
187 pages
Rights: World
Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.Amy
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Gender Studies · Jewish Studies · Victorian Studies · Literature
The Novel of the Future
By Anaïs Nin
·
Introduction by Deirdre Bair
In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in film, art, and dance as well as literature—to chart a new direction for the young artist struggling against what she perceived as the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of mid-twentieth-century fiction.
Literary Criticism · American Literature · Anaïs Nin · Creative Nonfiction · Literature
Vernon Lee
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
A startlingly original study, Vernon Lee adds new dimensions to the legacy of this woman of letters whose career spans the transition from the late Victorian to the modernist period. Christa Zorn draws on archival materials to discuss Lee’s work in terms of British aestheticism and in the context of the Western European history of ideas.
Gender Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Women’s Studies
Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
By Alicia Carroll
Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.Placing
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies · Race and Ethnicity
Sign up to be notified when new Literature titles come out.
We will only use your email address to notify you of new titles in the subject area(s) you follow. We will never share your information with third parties.
