“Standing in a Doorway Looking”: Doris Lessing's Transnational Readings

Abstract

Doris Lessing's transnational life enabled her to write from a liminal position on the threshold of two different cultures – British and Rhodesian – and informed her development into a cosmopolitan thinker. This chapter explores the ways in which her work reflects David Damrosch's definition of “world literature” as “a mode of circulation and of reading.” Her metafictional interest in readers and reading, evident in both The Golden Notebook (1962) and her Nobel Lecture (2007), illuminates the ways in which the category of “world literature” draws critical attention to our reading strategies. Her work demonstrates a committed concern with scalar thinking which provides both a historical context for and provocative examples of the kind of “scale‐crossing” imagination that ecocriticism identifies as crucial for our contemporary moment and renders her work highly relevant to emergent literary criticism of world literature.