Scholarship and criticism on Doris Lessing

Notice

This is not necessarily a "complete" bibliography of scholarship on this author. Rather, it is a selective bibliography of feminist SF scholarship, or scholarship of particular interest to feminist SF scholars.

journals

• Doris Lessing Studies
• Doris Lessing Newsletter

articles

ABC

Marleen Barr.

• "Working at Loving: The Postseparatist Feminist Utopia." Actes du XIe colloque de CERLI, January 26-27 1990. In Eros, Science Fiction, Fantastique Aix-en-Provence: Universite de Provence, 1991. pages 179-189. about Doris Lessing, Pamela Sargent, and Joan Slonczewski.

Nancy Topping Bazin.

• "British Reviews of Shikasta." Doris Lessing Newsletter v. 4 (Winter 1980): pp. 7, 9-15.

C. J. Bullock, and Kay L. Stewart.

• "Post-Party Politics: Doris Lessing's Novels of the Seventies." Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 245-57.

Deborah Byrd.

• "A Permanent Escape from the Underworld: Doris Lessing's Use of the Demeter / Kore Myth in Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five." Paper given at the mid-Hudson MLA Meeting, Poughkeepsie, New York, November 23, 1983.

Linda E. Chown.

• "Revisiting Reliable Narration and the Politics of Perspective", Doris Lessing Studies, v.25, n.1 (Spring 2005), pp. 16-18.

Mariette Clare.

• Doris Lessing and Women's Appropriation of Science Fiction. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1984.

DEF

Betsy Draine.

• "Changing Forms: Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor." Studies in the Novel, v. 11 (1979): pp. 51-62.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

• "The Feminist Apologues of Lessing, Piercy, and Russ." Frontiers Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 1979): Pages 1-8.

Finney, Kathe Davis. Kathe Finney Davis?

• "The Days of Future Past, or Utopian's Lessing and Le Guin Fight Future Nostalgia," in Donald M. Hassler, editor, Patterns of the Fantastic (Academic Programming at Chicon IV.) (Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983; San Bernadino, Calif: Borgo Press, 1983), pages 31-40.

Katherine Fishburn.

• The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing. Westport, Connectictu: Greenwood, 1985.
• "Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell: Science Fiction or Psycho-Drama." Science-Fiction Studies v 44 (1988): pp. 48-60.

GHI

Lesley Hazleton.

• "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism, and 'Space Fiction.'" New York Times Sunday Magazine 25 July 1982: pages 20-21.

Earl G. Ingersoll.

• "The Engendering of Narrative in Doris Lessing's Shikasta and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." in Visions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fifteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts edited by Allienne R. Becker. Westport: Greenwood, 1996, pp. 39-47.

JKL

Naomi Jacobs.

• "Beyond Stasis and Symmetry: Lessing, Le Guin, and the Remodeling of Utopia." Extrapolation 29, no. 1 (1988): pages 33-45; reprinted in Utopian Studies II, edited by Michael S. Cummings and Nicholas D. Smith, editors; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989: pp. 109-117.

Lee Cullen Khanna.

• "Truth and Art in Women's Worlds: Doris Lessing's Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five." Women and Utopia Ed. Marleen Barr and Nicholas O. Smith. New York: University Press of America, 1983.

Carole Klein.

• Doris Lessing: In This World But Not Of It (Little, Brown & Co.: Boston, 1999). Biography, 448 pp.

Mona Knapp.

• Doris Lessing. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Lauren Lacey.

• "Genealogy and Becoming in the Canopus in Argos: Archives Series." Doris Lessing Studies, v.25, n.2 (Winter 2006): pp. 18-23.

Linda Leith.

• "Canopus in Limbo," Science-Fiction Studies, (1986): pages 320-321.

MNOP

P. Parrinder

• "Descents into Hell: The Later Novels of Doris Lessing." Critical Quarterly 22 (1980): pages 7-19.

Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis.

• "The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space in Doris Lessing's Shikasta." Science Fiction Studies v. 17 (1990) pp. 221-238.
• Spiritual Explorations in the Works of Doris Lessing (Greenwood Press, 1999) (Contributions to the Study of SF and Fantasy, no. 81). Includes:

Seeing Differently: "The Spiritual Immersed within the Everyday" - Ages of Anxiety: The Diaries of Jane Somers (Virginia Tiger) - Pursuing Difference in The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (Eral G. Ingersol) - Approaching the Apocalypse: Individual and Cultural Collapse and the Seeds of New Vision - Androgyny or Catastrophe: Doris Lessing's Vision in the Early 70s (Nancy Topping Bazin) - Cabalistic Gardens: Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor (Debrah Raschke) - White Settlers in the Heart of Empire: Visionary Power in Lessing's The Four-Gated City (Cherry Clayton) - Doris Lessing's Prophetic Voice in Shikasta: Cassandra or Sybil ? (Jeannette Weber) - Beyond the Binary: "It Isn't Either or..It's and, and, and, and" - The Whirlpool and the Fountain: Inner Growth and Love, Again (Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis) - "A Question of Wholes": Spiritual Intersecting, Universal Re-Visions in the Work of Doris Lessing (Melanie Hunter & Darby McIntosh) - Considering the Stars: The Expanding Universe of Doris Lessing's Work (Josna E. Rege)

QRS

Barbara Hill Rigney.

• Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Robin Ann Roberts.

• A New Species: The Female Tradition in Science Fiction from Mary Shelley to Doris Lessing. Dissertation, 1985.
• "The Paradigm of Frankenstein: Reading Canopus in Argos in the Context of Science Fiction by Women," Extrapolation, v. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1985): pp. 16-23.

Roberta Rubenstein.

• The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Lorna Sage.

• Doris Lessing. London: Methuen, 1983.

Ruth Saxton.

• "Lessing in California, April 5-10." Doris Lessing Newsletter 8 (Fall 1984): 7.

Claire Sprague.

• Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Susan Stamberg.

• "An Interview with Doris Lessing." Doris Lessing Newsletter 8 (1984): 3-4, 15.

Catharine R. Stimpson.

• "Doris Lessing and the Parables of Growth" in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983. pp. 186-205.

Judith Stitzell.

• "Reading Doris Lessing." College English 40 (1979): 498-504.

TUV

Virginia Tiger.

• "Candid Shot." Doris Lessing Newsletter 8 (Fall 1984): 5.
• "'The Words Had Been Right and Necessary' Doris Lessing's Transformations of Utopian and Dystopian Modalities in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five." Style (DeKalb, Illinois), v. 27 (Spring 1993), pages 63-80.