From the Margins of Empire : : Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer / / Louise Yelin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Yelin, Louise,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Reading Women Writing
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.)

Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors—white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies—reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African. Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: From the Margins of Empire -- Part I: Christina Stead: Buffoon Odyssey? -- 1. Unsettling Australia: The Man Who Loved Children as National Family Romance -- 2. "Buffoon Odyssey"?: For Love Alone and the Writing of Exile -- Part II. Doris Lessing: In Pursuit of the English -- 3. The Englishing of Doris Lessing -- 4. 'Integrated with British Life at Its Roots": The Construction of British Identity in The Golden Notebook -- 5. Reading Doris Lessing with Margaret Thatcher: The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, and England in the 1980s -- Part III. Nadine Gordimer: Literature and Politics in South Africa -- 6. European Genealogies and South African Identity in Burger's Daughter -- 7. Decolonizing the Novel: A Sport of Nature as Postcolonial Picaresque -- 8. Beyond Identity: The Poetics of Nonracialism and the Politics of Cultural Translation in My Son's Story -- Conclusion: Writing beyond the Margins -- Works Cited -- Index