Doris Lessing’s Fiction: Literature as Commitment

Abstract

The publication of The Grass Is Singing in 1950 inaugurated the long and distinguished literary career of Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013), the 2007 Nobel laureate for literature. The novel, written when Lessing was twenty-five years old, proves to be highly anticipatory in that it displays several interconnected thematic correspondences with the main motifs informing its author’s entire production and testifies to the oppositional, if not subversive, nature of her works with respect to the normative symbolic foundations of society buttressed within official discourse in England and its colonies from the 1950s onward. Moreover, the “eclectic realism” (Splendore 2000) characterizing the novel’s formal aspect paves the way to Lessing’s future aesthetic experimentalism and stylistic innovations.