Iris Murdoch : The Retrospective Fiction

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction 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. Drawing on many of her key works, and providing the first analysis of her 'first-person retrospective' novels as a separate group within the larger body of her fiction, the book also considers Murdoch's relation to key currents within twentieth-century thought, like modernism. postmodernism, and psychoanalysis. Iris Murdoch: the Retrospective Fiction considers one of the major British novelists of the postwar years in a new light, arguing that Murdoch's compulsive plots and characters are motivated by the insistent power of the past. Bran Nicol traces a fascinating 'double movement' at work in Murdoch's fiction, where the past figures as an elusive site of 'truth' and an inescapable source of trauma. Through persuasive readings of some of her key novels Nicol demonstrates 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 art and rational investigation. The book is the first to examine her 'first-person retrospective novels' as a separate group within the larger body of her work. In these novels, the concern with the past is intensified by the peculiar synthesis of form and content. The book also provides an accessible and lively consideration of how Murdoch's fiction and theory relate to some of the key currents of twentieth-century thought: postmodernism and poststructuralism, Bakhtin's poetics, modernism and psychoanalysis Front Matter....Pages i-xviii Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch’s Realism....Pages 1-28 The Insistence of the Past....Pages 29-48 Narrative as Redemption: The Bell....Pages 49-63 Author and Hero: Murdoch’s First-Person Retrospective Novels....Pages 64-86 Reading Past Truth: Under the Net and The Black Prince....Pages 87-107 The Writing Cure: A Severed Head and A Word Child....Pages 108-129 The Ambivalence of Coming Home: The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea....Pages 130-149 Philosophy’s Dangerous Pupil: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Derrida and The Philosopher’s Pupil....Pages 150-166 Postscript: Reading Iris Murdoch....Pages 167-178 Back Matter....Pages 179-201 "Iris Murdoch: the Retrospective Fiction considers one of the major British novelists of the postwar years in a new light, arguing that Murdoch's compulsive plots and characters are motivated by the insistent power of the past. Bran Nicol traces a 'double movement' at work in Murdoch's fiction, where the past figures as an elusive site of 'truth' and an inescapable source of trauma. Through persuasive readings of some of her key novels Nicol demonstrates 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 art and rational investigation."--Jacket "The book also provides an accessible and lively consideration of how Murdoch's fiction and theory relate to some of the key currents of twentieth-century thought: postmodernism and poststructuralism, Bakhtin's poetics, modernism and psychoanalysis."--Jacket