A Critical Study Of Iris Murdoch S Fiction

The Fictional Scene In England, Immediately After The Second World War, Makes An Interesting Reading. Many Critical Studies Have, In Great Depth, Investigated The Historical Processes To Highlight The Various Directions The Novelists Moved In Then. At The Same Time, There Was A Concurrent And A Deliberate Attempt On The Part Of These Novelists To Discard The Heritage Of 'Modernism.' Iris Murdoch, Who Is One Of The Most Prominent Novelists Of This Period, Also Shared The Distrust Of Her Contemporaries For The So-Called Literary Radicalism. However, She Remains Distinct As A Writer Among Her Contemporaries, In Her Awareness Of The Problems Of The Novel And Language, In Her Adherence, Both To The Idealism About Human Potentiality And Perfectibility That Liberal Humanism Had Contained. But She Is Also Conscious Of The Limited Individual Capacity To Reach That Ideal. Her Creative Career Is Marked By Her Desire To Bring Back To The Novel, Some Of Its Earlier Comprehensive Vision Of Life, Society And Human Character.The Present Book Attempts To Reveal Those Important Areas Of Murdoch'S Thought Which Set Her Apart From Other Novelists Writing At That Time. Her Search For Literary Metaphors Which Aim At Restoring To Novel Some Of Its Lost Moorings Is A Significant, Almost Iconoclastic Effort. Taking Help From Her Non-Fictional Treatises, An Attempt Has Been Made In This Book To Highlight The Platonic Burden Of Her Literary And Aesthetic Creed.

In Why Iris Murdoch Matters Gary Browning draws on as yet unpublished archival material to present an unrivalled overview of Murdoch's work and thought. Browning argues for Murdoch's position amongst the key theorists of modern life, and discusses in detail her engagement with the notion of late modernity. Her multiple perspectives on art, philosophy, religion, politics and the self all relate to how she understands the nature of late modernity. Browning lucidly illustrates that through both her thought and fiction we can grasp the significance of issues that remain of paramount importance today: the possibilities of a moral life without foundations, the meaning of philosophy in a post-metaphysical age, the prospects of politics without ideological certainties and the significance of art after realism. A totally original work arguing persuasively that Iris Murdoch not only matters but is absolutely central to how we think through the contemporary age.

The first study of the literary criticism on Murdoch's novels.

Iris Murdoch was both a popular and intellectually serious novelist, whose writing life spanned the latter half of the twentieth century. A proudly Anglo-Irish writer who produced twenty-six best-selling novels, she was also a respected philosopher, a theological thinker and an outspoken public intellectual. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes that characterise her fiction decade by decade, explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist, explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction. While Iris Murdoch is acknowledged here as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, she is also presented as a figure whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology has immense resonance for twenty-first-century readers.

Originally published in 1982, this brilliant study provides a perceptive and up-to-date assessment of the novels of Iris Murdoch, up to and including Nuns and Soldiers, published in 1980. The Fire and the Sun, her book on Plato, is also considered in depth. It is not a critical biography, but rather shows how massive Murdoch’s literary career was at the time and what her contribution has been to aesthetics, literary criticism, the realistic novel, and to the possibilities of ethical and religious action in a horror-filled and secular age. Above all, the book is interested in forwarding Murdoch’s cause among her readers. It is not aimed simply at those who have read and studied all of her novels, the text will appeal to the readers of only a few of them, as well as literary scholars and students of contemporary fiction and modern culture.

Iris Murdoch produced twenty-six novels in forty years. The last of these, Jackson's Dilemma, was published in 1995, four years before her death. Murdoch's interest in moral problems inclined her towards what could be seen as an unusual view of human character and human life, leading her to create bizarre situations and offer unsettling solutions which frequently challenge and intrigue the reader. This essential introduction to one of Britain's best-known writers guides the reader through the full range of Murdoch's fictional output, tracing basic patterns which run throughout Murdoch's work and showing how the novels help to elucidate one another. The revised, updated and expanded new edition takes into account certain details which have emerged following Murdoch's death in 1999, incorporates the latest scholarship and offers fuller treatment of a number of novels. The second edition also gives more weight to the development of the moral discourse which is predominant in Murdoch's work. From the mid-sixties onwards, Murdoch was intensely concerned with the problems of Good and Evil in a godless world. In the later novels, particularly those of the eighties and nineties, she posited the possibility of mystic personalities who influence others from a position beyond the normal parameters of our world. Hilda D. Spear examines these mystic, and mysterious, fictions in the later chapters of her study, and argues that Jackson's Dilemma should be viewed as Murdoch's 'unfinished novel'.

Iris Murdoch was one of the great philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century and The Sovereignty of Good is her most important and enduring philosophical work. She argues that philosophy has focused, mistakenly, on what it is right to do rather than good to be and that only by restoring the notion of ‘vision’ to moral thinking can this distortion be corrected. This brilliant work shows why Iris Murdoch remains essential reading: a vivid and uncompromising style, a commitment to forceful argument, and a courage to go against the grain. With a foreword by Mary Midgley.