In this post I will continue my discussion of mimesis—world building—in Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Neighbour. There is an overabundance of great mimetic material in this novel; I will hit some of the high points. In my previous post I discussed the beginning of The Good Neighbour—first, the initial summary of antecedent action (in … Continue reading More on Lessing

In my previous post I compared some passages of mimesis—world building—in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. I was arguing that literary realism is not a simple category; literary language is not a transparent window through which we just look at what’s out there, even in realistic styles. … Continue reading Mimesis in Doris Lessing’s “The Good Neighbour”

Every novel presents a world to the reader. The building of a narrative world doesn’t have to happen all at once, though it’s common for at least some world building to occur at the beginning. If the world of a narrative is close to something we can, for the moment, call normal reality, then the … Continue reading Mimesis in Austen and Cather