Susan Watkins – författare

This provocative, lively book discusses two of the most significant influences on writing and thinking in the twentieth century: women novelists and feminist theory. It demonstrates, in an accessible but imaginative manner, ways of reading women's novels alongside work by feminist theorists. Each chapter situates a small number of theoretical texts in their intellectual context and then links them with a widely taught novel to produce fresh interpretations. The novels and theorists represent examples of extremely significant, but also pedagogically useful feminist writing this century.

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing’s relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter; it makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's continued interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race and the connections between them.The book examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing’s work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

This is an edited collection offering up-to-date critical coverage of a wide range of Lessing's work. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and 'space fiction', and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to "The Fifth Child" and "The Grass is Singing", eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

Functional Clothing Design is a book about how and why clothing works. This interdisciplinary text introduces new ways to look at the human body, the environment and clothing and to explore the relationships between them by looking at the ways clothing achieves goals such as protecting the body, increasing health and safety, improving a worker’s efficiency on the job or increasing body function. Watkins and Dunne present technical material using clear, simple language that can be readily understood by beginning design students with no science or engineering background. Building on the groundbreaking text by Watkins, Clothing: The Portable Environment, this text covers a full range of factors involved in designing functional clothing: protection from thermal, impact and other environmental hazards; enhancing movement and visibility and increasing body function with smart clothing; designing clothing for people with handicaps and designing protective clothing for groups such as the military, who face multiple hazards. Functional Clothing Design focuses on the full range of activities needed to develop functional clothing—from analysis of user needs to choosing appropriate materials to design and design evaluation. The text includes case studies throughout as well as new content on smart textiles and all the latest developments in wearable technology. Designers and others seeking clothing solutions to problems in many fields will find a common language linking a number of disciplines through which they can explore both problems and solutions.

Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism.

This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction.

This study re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten texts against the challenges of their milieus, it considers twentieth-century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.