African and Islamic: Doris Lessing's Notion of Writerly Commitment in "The Small Personal Voice".

Doris Lessing celebrates the realist, committed novel and laments its absence in much of modern literature. Her theory of literature emanates from an understanding of good and evil and has an instructive function. Accordingly, she admires nineteenth-century realist novelists and commends their efforts to document and question unjust social practices. Based on Lessing's literary credo titled "The Small Personal Voice," in this paper I shall explicate her notion of literary commitment and regard it as a counter to literary aestheticism, relating her idea of committedness to her African past and evaluating her theory of art articulated in the essay from the Islamic viewpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]