Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival

In addition to the cooperation that distinguishes Lessing criticism, its other remarkable quality is its complex eclecticism, arising from this widespread readership. No single scholar has said, or, indeed, tried to say, the definitive word on Lessing. Instead, recognizing that one of Lessing's dominant and most poignant themes is the impossibility of absolute definition, the fragmentary nature of reality, the modern world's resistance to assignment of meaning, academics have tacitly engaged in a critical endeavor that is always seeking, never static. Because Lessing's books never allow the reader to settle down comfortably, respectful scholars, learning life stances as well as literature from Lessing, have also never settled but have approached the books and stories from all available critical directions: Jungian/archetypal; Marxist; Freudian; reader response; feminist; New Critical; semiotic and deconstructionist and combinations of several of these. None have contained Lessing's work but all have elucidated it.
The eleven essays we have assembled represent both the diversity of approaches scholars have taken to Lessing's oeuvre since 1971, when they began meeting to share their views at the annual MLA convention, and the creative differance of their colloquy. Although by now you are probably eager to read the essays we have distilled from the lively ferment of Lessing panels at the last fifteen annual MLA conventions, we would like you to defer that pleasure in order to share our celebration of the tenacious vitality of a unique community of scholars, united paradoxically by their cordial, collegial tolerance of each other's different responses to a body of work that has changed lives as it has challenged the critical establishment.
Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, the editors