Doris May Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

Val Scullion (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1975

Places

Iran (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Memoirs of a Survivor (Octagon Press, 1974) is a pivotal novel. It marks a transition from Doris Lessing's earlier preoccupation with psychological inner space (most apparent in Briefing For a Descent into Hell, 1971) to her space fiction series (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-83, featuring benevolent alien colonisation of earth). The Memoirs of a Survivor is set in the near future at “a time of savagery and anarchy” (p.54), although it is never made clear what kind of global crisis brought about such anarchic conditions. In this respect, Memoirs is less explicit than the final dystopian section of the earlier novel, The Four-gated City (1969), which describes planet Earth as …

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2777 words

Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Memoirs of a Survivor". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 October 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3669, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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