By the end of this lecture, learners will be able to:

  1.  Identify key feminist and postcolonial concepts, such as fragmentation, intertextuality, marginalisation, and narrative authority, as they appear in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and A.S. Byatt's Possession.
  2. Explain how mid- and late-20th-century socio-political contexts shaped the emergence of feminist and postcolonial discourse in British fiction.
  3. Apply selected theoretical frameworks (e.g., Simone de Beauvoir, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha) to analyse themes of gender, identity, and power in the novels.
  4. Critically examine the ways formal features, such as metafiction, multiple narratives, and non-linear structure, express feminist resistance and postcolonial critique.
  5. Evaluate how each author challenges traditional literary canons and gendered knowledge production within British literature.
  6. Construct original arguments comparing how Lessing and Byatt represent women’s subjectivity and agency within historical and literary institutions.