Iris Murdoch

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch’s Realism

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 1-28

3. The Insistence of the Past

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 29-48

4. Narrative as Redemption: The Bell

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 49-63

5. Author and Hero: Murdoch’s First-Person Retrospective Novels

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 64-86

6. Reading Past Truth: Under the Net and The Black Prince

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 87-107

7. The Writing Cure: A Severed Head and A Word Child

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 108-129

8. The Ambivalence of Coming Home: The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 130-149

9. Philosophy’s Dangerous Pupil: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Derrida and The Philosopher’s Pupil

   • Bran Nicol

   Pages 150-166

10. Postscript: Reading Iris Murdoch

    • Bran Nicol

    Pages 167-178

11. Back Matter

    Pages 179-201

    PDF

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.

• fiction
• Modernism
• novel
• postmodernism
• realism

• University College Portsmouth, UK

  Bran Nicol

BRAN NICOL is Lecturer in English at University College, Chichester.

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