Professor Susan Watkins

This fascinating new volume re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere.

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 to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's ‘Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

The first volume of Doris Lessing’s official autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) returns her to memories of her African childhood, but also necessitates that she reassess the status of official and ‘fictionalised’ accounts of the past, especially her own story of the impact of colonization and Empire on her family, herself and the native African population in Southern Rhodesia. At the time Under My Skin appeared In the 1990s, feminist critics were working out the distinctive features of women’s autobiographical writing, and much more recently those of postcolonial life writing have been identified by critics such as Bart Moore-Gilbert (2009). This article will consider whether categories such as feminist autobiography, autobiography of empire or postcolonial autobiography are actually helpful in reading Under My Skin, and will investigate whether or not it is more appropriate to consider the text as an example of ‘second world’ life writing. As a second-world writer, to use Stephen Slemon’s 1990 term, Lessing’s ambivalence about issues of gender, race, empire and nation, both her complicity with colonialism as the daughter of white invader settlers and her resistance to it, become easier to analyse. In order to understand how this ambivalence plays out in the text the article will investigate whether the trope Helen Tiffin (1998) identifies as particular to second world women’s life writing – dispersive citation – is useful in reading Lessing’s autobiography and making sense of her intervention in the genre of life writing.

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left–wing politics and the second–wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over–ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts.

This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction.

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 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. The book examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing’s work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

This provocative book discusses two of the most significant influences on writing and thinking in the 20th century: women novelists and feminist theory.

Across more than 30 chapters spanning migration, queerness, and climate change, this handbook captures how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavor of Age(ing) studies has shaped contemporary literary and film studies.

Focusing on the contemporary period, this book brings together critical age studies and contemporary science fiction to establish the centrality of age and ageing in dystopian, speculative and science-fiction imaginaries.

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period.

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine new futures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

In traditional gerontological terms, adaptation is usually understood as the production of physical aids to mitigate the impairment effects caused by age-related disabilities, or as those alterations organisations need to make under the concept of reasonable adjustment to prevent age discrimination (in the UK, for example, age has been a protected characteristic under the Equality Act since 2010). This article will be the first to examine ageing in relation to theories of adaptation within cultural studies and the humanities. It is thus an interdisciplinary intervention within the field of cultural gerontology and cultural theories of adaptation. Adaptation studies in cultural studies and the humanities have moved away from fidelity criticism (the issue of how faithful an adaptation is to its original) towards thinking of adaptation as a creative, improvisational space. We ask if theories of adaptation as understood within cultural studies and the humanities can help us develop a more productive and creative way of conceptualising the ageing process, which reframes ageing in terms of transformational and collaborative adaptation. Moreover, for women in particular, this process of adaptation involves engagement with ideas of women’s experience that encompass an adaptive, intergenerational understanding of feminism. Our article draws on interviews with the producer and scriptwriter of the Representage theatre group’s play My Turn Now. The script for the play is adapted from a 1993 co-authored book written by a group of six women who were then in their 60s and 70s, who founded a networking group for older women.

Cultural gerontology has developed critical work around cultural representations of age and ageing and their role in the reproduction of ageism. However, the cultural industries as producers and disseminators of representations remain under researched. This paper draws on a focus group with four older women actors to argue that workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics intersect with cultural attitudes around women’s ageing to impact on older women actors’ career opportunities. We argue that ageism within the cultural industries is limiting our ability to develop diverse and non-ageist cultural representation of women’s ageing.