According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing's novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human experience. Her doubles and multiples not only indicate the fracturing or the formation of identity but they also are among the several strategies used to project complex private and societal concerns. This study of Lessing's dialectical imagination extends and revises earlier feminist approaches.

Originally published in 1987.

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"It" is right wing revolution in America. That can't happen here. But the unimaginable does happen here in three daring counterfactual novels by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth. Not where or how it was supposed to happen. For the usual suspects, alien ideologues, are not the perpetrators. Instead, insiders, including two elected presidents, make the revolution. In "The Iron Heel," London imagines a terrorist proto-fascist Oligarchy that precipitates its overthrow of the elected government by throwing a bomb in the House of Representatives in 1913. "It" happens again in 1936 when...

The phenomenon of Doris Lessing's global reputation and readership is addressed for the first time in In Pursuit of Doris Lessing through a series of essays that also provide a provocative overview of Lessing's long career from The Grass Is Singing, the first of a series of African and woman-centered politically radical works, to her latest galactic and politically conservative works. Nine different Lessings emerge from these essays, forcing us to question received propositions about the universality of literature and the stability of the text and uncovering and recovering in the process the...