Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty

by Ridout, Alice; Rubenstein, Roberta; Singer, Sandra

• ISBN13: 9781137488374
• ISBN10: 1137488379
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-05-20
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, ground-breaking in both narrative form and subject matter when it was first published in 1962, encompasses important political and social developments of the mid-twentieth century, from the politics of apartheid in southern Africa to the early stirrings of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the Cold War and the dissolution of Communism. The twelve essays collected here, prompted by the novel's golden anniversary, encompass a range of approaches from critical analyses to appreciative essays by scholars who knew Lessing personally. More than a half-century of chronological distance has prompted new and stimulating geopolitical, autobiographical, theoretical, and aesthetic readings by established and emerging scholars across several generations and nationalities, who offer up-to-date insights for twenty-first century readers of this influential novel.

Author Biography

Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor of English at Algoma University, Canada. She is the author of Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (2010) and co-editor of Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009). She is President of the Doris Lessing Society.

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University, Washington, DC, where she teaches courses on Modernism, modern and contemporary women writers, and nineteenth-century Russian literature. She is the author of five books, including her pioneering book, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979); Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009); and, most recently, Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (2014).

Sandra Singer is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, where she teaches and publishes on contemporary fiction, and trauma and terrorism in literature. She was co-editor of Doris Lessing Studies from 2004-2014 and co-edited Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (2010).

Table of Contents

Introduction; Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer
PART I: POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS
1. "Across the Frontiers": Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook; Julie Cairnie
2. Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence; Mark Pedretti
3. "Through That Gap the Future Might Pour": Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook; Cornelius Collins
4. Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden Notebook; Sandra Singer
PART II: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, AESTHETIC, AND THEORETICAL RECONSIDERATIONS
5. The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and roman à clef; Roberta Rubenstein
6. Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon; Tonya Krouse
7. "So Why Write Novels?" The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Politics of Authorship; Sophia Helen Barnes
8. Re-reading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit; Alice Ridout
PART III: "TIMING IS ALL": PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
9. The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me; Paul Schlueter
10. I Remember Doris Lessing and her Unforgettable Novel; Jonah Raskin
11. Timing is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now; Florence Howe
12. The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading; Gillian Beer