Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change - Tapa dura

"Most books that treat of atomic catastrophe are a hard sell, the reason being, of course, that scarcely anybody can bear to read them. But The Woman Who Knew Too Much is something of an exception. . . . A book that unflinchingly describes the contemporary human situation." --Anna Mayo, The Texas Observer, August 2001 -- (09/24/2001) "This highly recommended book, which is certain to have a major impact on Lessing studies, should be owned by all academic libraries." --Choice -- (04/01/1999)

Doris Lessing has been a chronicler of our age for nearly half a century, and a study of her writing career does not yield easy generalizations. Difficult though she is to categorize, she is always concerned with change, with a search for "something new" against "the nightmare repetition" of history. The feminist quest she articulated in The Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook entered the culture with the force of a new myth: these books changed lives. The Golden Notebook--together with such works as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique--raised the consciousness of a generation of women readers and played a major part in making the second wave of feminism. It is the power of Lessing's novels to change people's lives, the effect she had raising the consciousness of a generation of women and the effect she continues to have on young readers, that is the subject of this book. Doris Lessing is a readable yet theoretically informed study of this vastly complex and important writer that attempts to account for her wide and lasting appeal and that hopes to reach many of the readers Lessing herself reaches.