Synopses & Reviews
Iris Murdoch considers one of the major British novelists of the post-war years in a new light, arguing that Murdoch's compulsive plots and characters are strongly motivated by the question of the past. Through persuasive readings of some of her key novels it suggests that the past is continually made present in Murdoch's fiction in a number of ways: through guilt, nostalgia, the uncanny, and also by way of rational investigation and art. The book is also the first to examine her "first-person retrospective novels" as a separate group within the larger body of her fiction work, in which the peculiar synthesis of form and content intensifies the significance of the past. A major aim of the book is to offer an accessible and lively consideration of how Murdoch's fiction and theory related to some of the key currents within 20th-century thought: postmodernism and poststructuralism, Bakhtin, modernism and psychoanalysis.
Synopsis
Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch's Realism Iris Murdoch and the Insistence of the Past Author and Hero: Murdoch's First -Person Retrospective Novels Reading Past Truth: Under the Net and The Black Prince The Writing Cure: A Severed Head and A Word Child The Ambivalence of Coming Home: The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea Notes Bibliography Index
Synopsis
A Study of the significance of the past in Iris Murdoch's fiction, especially her first-person novels.
About the Author
Bran Nicol is Lecturer in English at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education.
Table of Contents
Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch's Realism * Iris Murdoch and the Insistence of the Past * Author and Hero: Murdoch's First--Person Retrospectives Novels * Reading Past Truth:
Under the Net and
The Black Prince * The Writing Cure:
A Severed Head and
A Word Child * The Ambivalence of Coming Home:
The Italian Girl and
The Sea, the Sea * Bibliography * Index