TY - JOUR
T1 - What's the Time, Anna Wulf? Crisis, Temporality and Feminist Untimeliness in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook
AU - Waters, Melanie
PY - 2023/12/22
Y1 - 2023/12/22
N2 - When Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962, it was instantly lauded as a timely novel. In this essay, I investigate what is timely about The Golden Notebook through an analysis of the novel's complex temporality. Taking the book's phenomenal critical legacy as a signal indication that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing's provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures that confine Lessing and her characters. In doing so, I also gesture, speculatively, toward how these structures might be subverted in the future.
AB - When Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962, it was instantly lauded as a timely novel. In this essay, I investigate what is timely about The Golden Notebook through an analysis of the novel's complex temporality. Taking the book's phenomenal critical legacy as a signal indication that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing's provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures that confine Lessing and her characters. In doing so, I also gesture, speculatively, toward how these structures might be subverted in the future.
U2 - 10.1353/mfs.2023.a915958
DO - 10.1353/mfs.2023.a915958
M3 - Article
SN - 0026-7724
VL - 69
SP - 593
EP - 613
JO - MFS - Modern Fiction Studies
JF - MFS - Modern Fiction Studies
IS - 4
ER -