Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Lessing, Doris (Vol. 94) - Virginia Tiger (essay date Autumn 1990)

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Virginia Tiger (essay date Autumn 1990)

SOURCE: "'Taking Hands and Dancing in (Dis)Unity': Story to Storied in Doris Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen' and 'A Room,'" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 421-33.

[Tiger is a Canadian critic and educator. In the following essay, she focuses on Lessing's short stories "To Room Nineteen" and "A Room" in her discussion of the author's use of narrative voice and realistic literary techniques. Tiger also examines the ways in which these two stories relate to the novels Lessing constructed from them, The Summer Before the Dark and The Memoirs of a Survivor, respectively.]

"To see" is the dominant verb in the realist text "à la gastronomie de l'oeil" as Balzac expressed it—and realist fiction is preeminently concerned with seeing, with a seeing in detail.

  —Mark Seltzer ["The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Katherine Fishburn (essay date Summer 1988)
   2. Virginia Tiger (essay date Autumn 1990)
   3. John Bemrose (review date 24 August 1992)
   4. K. Anthony Appiah (review date 28 June 1993)
   5. Harriet Ritvo (review date 13 January 1994)
   6. Lisa Tyler (essay date Spring 1994)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 20 October 1994)
   8. Basil Davidson (review date 22 October 1994)
   9. Michiko Kakutani (review date 1 November 1994)
   10. Caroline Moorehead (review date 4 November 1994)
   11. J. M. Coetzee (review date 22 December 1994)
   12. William H. Pritchard (review date Summer 1995)
   13. Carol Franko (essay date Summer 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright