AESTHETIC EVOLUTION AND GENRE DYNAMICS IN DORIS LESSING’S SHORT STORIES
Keywords:
Doris Lessing, short fiction, aesthetic evolution, genre dynamics, hybridity, African stories, psychological realism, narrative strategies, modernism, literary transformation.Abstract
This comprehensive academic study explores the aesthetic evolution and genre dynamics within the short stories of Doris Lessing, one of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. This research evaluates how Lessing’s short fiction serves as a dynamic macro-laboratory for her broader narrative experiments. By investigating her canonical works across distinct creative phases—ranging from her early African socio-political realism to her psychological-existential prose, and ultimately to her late-period allegorical and science fiction structures—this paper maps the trajectory of an author who constantly shattered conventional generic constraints. Utilizing comparative-historical analysis, genological criticism, and textual semantics, the study demonstrates that Lessing redefined the short story from a static, single-layered narrative into a highly flexible, multi-voiced, and hybridized medium. The results show that her genre dynamics are intrinsically linked to her evolving socio-philosophical, feminist, and ecological ideologies, shifting from localized anti-colonial critiques to universal diagnoses of humanity's existential and civilizational crises. Ultimately, this investigation recontextualizes Lessing’s shorter fiction, establishing it not merely as a precursor to her major novels, but as an autonomous, artistically complex body of work that dramatically transformed the landscape of modern short fiction.
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