Doris Lessing Border Crossings

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 toThe Fifth ChildandThe Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in herAfrican Stories.

Note on Contributors Introduction: Doris Lessing's Border Crossings, Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins (Leeds Metropolitan University, UK)1. Horrors of the Breast: Cultural Boundaries and the Abject in The Grass is Singing, Edith Frampton (San Diego State University, USA) 2. Inside and Outside Colonial Spaces: Border Crossings in Doris Lessing's African Stories', Pat Louw (University of Zululand, SA) 3. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction, Nick Bentley (University of Keele, UK) 4. Doris Lessing's Fantastic Children, Roberta Rubenstein (American University, US) 5. The ‘Jane Somers' Hoax: Aging, Gender and the Literary Marketplace, Susan Watkins (Leeds Metropolitan University, UK) 6. (Not Such) Great Expectations: Unmaking Maternal Ideals in The Fifth Child and We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ruth Robbins (Leeds Metropolitan University, UK) 7. Doris Lessing's Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan ‘Third Culture Kid', Alice Ridout (University of Leeds, UK) 8. Environmental Fables? The eco-politics of Doris Lessing's ‘Ifrik' novels, Fiona Becket, (University of Leeds, UK) 9. The Porous Border Between Fact and Fiction, Empathy and Identification in Doris Lessing's The Cleft, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis (University of Ottawa, CA) Afterword, Judith Kegan Gardiner Index