44 Result(s)
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British and Irish Literature
Gender Studies
Literary History
Twentieth-Century Literature
Chapter
Literature
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Chapter
Introduction
Like many of her readers, Doris Lessing has repeatedly reread her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). She has always been alert to the ways in which the context of the reader can generate diverse inter...
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The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading
Two big things happened to me in 1962: I got married and I read The Golden Notebook. I can’t now quite remember which happened first but they certainly flow together in my memory and even seem inseparable now. Do...
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Afterword
Between July and November of 2014 volunteers gradually covered the moat around the Tower of London in 888,246 ceramic red poppies, one for every British and British colonial life lost in the First World War. F...
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The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me
When I started doctoral study at Southern Illinois University in 1963 to work with Harry T. Moore, prolific critic and D. H. Lawrence biographer, I knew nothing of The Golden Notebook—or, for that matter, any of ...
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Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence
Doris Lessing’s long and multifaceted history of antinuclear activism is by this point well known. She was present at the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957 and participated in the ....
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Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden Notebook
Working with notions of realism, communism, and feminism in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing speaks to our current, multivalent postmodern condition. Yet in 1962, the fractured aesthetic of the novel seemed to ...
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Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon
From the moment of its publication in 1962, readers, reviewers, and scholars experienced some difficulty with Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: it didn’t neatly fit into the typical critical criteria for situa...
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Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit
“The Golden Notebook, first published in 1962, has had 50 years of an up-and-down life after a difficult birth,” Doris Lessing informs us in the short piece aptly titled “Guarded Welcome” at the end of the 2008 H...
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I Remember Doris Lessing and Her Illimitable Novel
Writing about The Golden Notebook (1962) feels, more often than not, like venturing into sacred territory reserved for members of a global priesthood. To borrow a cliché: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread....
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Sexual Gnosticism: Male Procreation and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’
In Sodom on the Thames, an exploration of late-Victorian male same-sex love through its legal manifestations leading up to the Wilde trials, Morris B. Kaplan dedicates considerable space to the homoerotic coterie...
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Love of the Impossible: Wilde’s Failed Queer Theory
Wilde’s collection of poems, generally known now as Poems 1881, constituted his first significant publication and his first resounding failure. Having been a conspicuous academic success, first at Trinity College...
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Priests of Keats: Wilfred Owen’s Pre-War Relationship to Wilde
In 1936, William Butler Yeats famously excluded the Great War combatant poets from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. In the Introduction to that volume, he justified his decision as a matter of thematics and, more...
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“Across the Frontiers”: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook
Many readers—whether devotee or dissenter—have personal and sometimes even visceral recollections of reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Having mostly avoided it for the last twenty-five years—which I a...
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“Through That Gap the Future Might Pour”: Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook
One of the complexities a reader encounters in the formal design of The Golden Notebook is the text’s constitution by a dizzying assortment of subtexts of varying style and mode. There are not only the five note...
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The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman à Clef
Regarding the distinctions between autobiographical fact and literary invention, Doris Lessing observed, “there is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”1 She acknowledged that her early fiction conta...
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“So Why Write Novels?” The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Politics of Authorship
More than fifty years on from the first publication of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, we have reached a juncture from which we can not only survey the history but also consider the future of the novel’s rec...
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Timing Is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now
Fifty-plus years ago, in 1963, I read The Golden Notebook and two years later decided to add it to my freshman writing course. By then, I had become The Nation’s reviewer for Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence ...
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Introduction
This book traces the development of Oscar Wilde’s thoughts and theories about the artistic importance of male same-sex relations and contends that these theories were passed on to Wilfred Owen, who in turn use...
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Shades of Green and Gray: Dual Meanings in Wilde’s Novel
In February of 1892 Wilde asked a number of his friends, including one of the actors, to wear a green carnation to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan. When one of the chosen coterie, Graham Robertson, ask...
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Oscar and Sons: The Afterlife of Male Procreation
My previous chapter ended with the image of certain of Wilde’s texts as his misbehaving children: rambunctious little brats who refuse to demonstrate the theories that they are supposed to uphold. In this scen...
