Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Doris Lessing (2003) (283p) [Inua].pdf

Doris Lessing (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Library Binding – December, 1986
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Library Binding: 224 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (December 1986)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0877547041
ISBN-13: 978-0877547044

Another great author has passed away - just this last November 2013. This book by Bloom was published in 1986. As all the books in this series here he collects essays by a wealth of authors on Doris Lessing's work. Bloom refers both to her authentic virtues and her severe limitations as an author of fiction. This sounds like one hand clapping.
"She has the spirit, if not the style, of the age."
- W. Jamison

Editor’s Note:
My Introduction centers upon “The Habit of Loving” and The Golden Notebook, and suggests that the crucial limitation in Lessing’s work is her too-literal distrust of her own language.
James Gindin begins the chronological sequence of criticism with a study of Lessing’s “intense commitment” to social justice in her earlier work. The Golden Notebook, still her best novel, is read by Paul Schlueter as an exercise in self-knowledge.
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis examines Jungian and Sufi perspectives in Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, after which Robert Boschman discusses the excremental vision of “The Good Terrorist.”
To Karen Schneider, Lessing is an authentic prophet against war and violence, while Sheila Roberts, comparing Lessing to Nadine Gordimer, finds social contradictions in both novelists.
Betsey Draine, commenting upon The Four-Gated City, sees Lessing’s Martha Quest as a wise realist though a visionary, after which Claire Sprague finds in Lessing an heroic pattern of the “mother/daughter dialectic.”
Lessing’s mastery of “the poetics of change” figures in Gayle Greene’s account of Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, while Roberta Rubenstein defends Briefing for a Descent into Hell, despite its palpably bad style of writing.
In a just estimate, Catharine R. Stimpson, looking at all the Martha Quest novels, sets aesthetic concerns aside as well as inadequate “politics of mind”, yet still affirms that Martha’s saga provides us with “goads to growth.”