Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty

Published in 1962, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook merits fresh theoretical, geopolitical, autobiographical, and aesthetic approaches. Prompted by the novel's golden anniversary, the twelve essays collected in this volume provide fresh analyses along with appreciative memoirs for 21st century readers of this well-known masterpiece.

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 Illimitable 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

About the Author :
Sophia Barnes, University of Sydney, Australia Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge, UK Julie Cairnie, University of Guelph, Canada Cornelius Collins, Fordham University, USA Florence Howe, CUNY Graduate Center, USA Tonya Krouse, Northern Kentucky University, USA Mark Pedretti, Case Western Reserve University, USA Jonah Raskin, Sonoma State University, USA Alice Ridout, Algoma University, Canada Roberta Rubenstein, American University, USA Paul Schlueter, Southern Illinois University, USA Sandra Singer, University of Guelph, Canada

Review :
"Fifty years after the publication of The Golden Notebook, a new generation of critics responds to Doris Lessing's masterpiece. These essays illuminate the novel's sources in Lessing's life and times; show what it has meant to generations of readers; and engage in wide-ranging discussions of the novel's politics, ethics, and aesthetics, and of its complex relationship to modernism and postmodernism. Anyone interested in Doris Lessing's writing will enjoy this collection!" - Toril Moi, Duke University, James B. Duke Professor of Literature, Duke University, USA "This volume perfectly captures why Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was such a landmark book. The collection contains a wonderful mixture of personal memories and fresh critical approaches to the novel that not only place it in its moment of publication but also make clear how it changed things for fiction to come." - Susan Watkins, Reader in Twentieth-Century Women's Prose Fiction, Leeds Beckett University, UK