Philip Tsang

Bio

Philip Tsang is an assistant professor at Colorado State University. His first book, The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Contributions

At the Periphery of Time: Doris Lessing and the Historical Novel

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Doris Lessing’s early essay “The Small Personal Voice” is often considered the fullest elaboration of her realist aesthetics. Prizing nineteenth-century realism (Tolstoy, Stendhal, Balzac) as “the highest form of prose writing,” she criticizes two dominant trends in contemporary fiction, namely Soviet realism and European modernism: novels about collective farms and five-year plans are “dreadful [and] lifeless,” while the writings of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett...

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realism time empire