Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Lessing, Doris (Vol. 170) - Susan Rowland (essay date 2000)

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Susan Rowland (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Rowland, Susan. “‘Transformed and Translated’: The Colonized Reader of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos Space Fiction.” In British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock, pp. 42-55. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Rowland contrasts Lessing's early political and artistic conceptions of “representation” with the thematic implications of Canopus in Argos.]

Doris Lessing's fiction has always regarded artistic representation as a political act. From the very first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), which sets a Mary who failed to bear a redemptive child on the regressive white colonial road until a black Moses leads her to the promised land of death, she has tested the extent to which any particular society can bear to be represented. The “Children of Violence” series (1952-69) interposed a female bildungsroman to contest...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Adele S. Newson (review date winter 1994)
   2. Julia O'Faolain (review date 5 April 1996)
   3. Ruth Brandon (review date 12 April 1996)
   4. Suzann Bick (review date fall 1996)
   5. Adele S. Newson (review date autumn 1996)
   6. Judith Grossman (review date October 1996)
   7. John Hobbs (review date 7 December 1996)
   8. Millicent Bell (review date summer 1997)
   9. Anthony Sampson (review date 31 October 1997)
   10. Jane Miller and Elaine Showalter (review date summer 1998)
   11. Elizabeth Powers (review date September 1998)
   12. Mara Kalnins (review date March 1999)
   13. Alex Clark (review date 2 April 1999)
   14. Judith E. Chettle (review date May 1999)
   15. Doris Lessing and Jonah Raskin (interview date June 1999)
   16. Mona Knapp (review date spring 2000)
   17. Miranda France (review date 24 June 2000)
   18. Trudy Bush (review date 13 December 2000)
   19. Susan Rowland (essay date 2000)
   20. Sarah Sceats (essay date 2000)
   21. Linda Simon (review date February 2001)
   22. Alan Davis (review date spring 2001)
   23. Philip Hensher (review date 1 September 2001)
   24. Stephanie Merritt (review date 1 October 2001)
   25. Jeff Zaleski (review date 21 January 2002)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright