Review article
The art of blurring the boundaries in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook—analysis of a postmodernist workbook
Aida Džiho-Šator
; Džemal Bijedić University of Mostar, Faculty Of Humanities
Abstract
Doris Lessings’ novel The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962 and has since been widely read by readers and critics, both because of its subject matter and its structural, postmodernist complexity. The most prominent features of postmodernist novels are metafiction, intertextuality and hybridity. This essay deals with the issue of the postmodernist category of hybridity and the ways Doris Lessing achieved it in the aforementioned novel, but it also reflects upon its connection with metafiction and intertextuality. The essay also focuses on intertextuality as a literary phenomenon, in the theoretical part of the text as well as in the part that deals with the analysis of the novel, since intertextuality is here observed in terms of blurring of boundaries between texts, that is, as the intertextuality of genres and the scope and depth of the intertextual analysis in this novel is limited precisely to that context. Hybridity in literature implies the mixing of different genres, styles, narrative techniques and narrative discourses, and in this essay we will look at the ways in which Lessing achieves this effect.
Keywords
hybridity; postmodernism; intertextuality; The Golden Notebook; Doris Lessing
Hrčak ID:
230316
URI
Publication date:
18.12.2019.
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