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Describes Murdoch as preoccupied with love, art, & the possibility & difficulty of doing good & avoiding evil.
Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London is a celebration of Iris Murdoch’s love for London and establishes her amongst distinguished “London writers” such as William Blake, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Individual chapters focus on the City, London art galleries and museums, the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Whitehall and the River Thames. Each chapter identifies intricate links between the environment and human consciousness and is accompanied by a corresponding walk that links Murdoch’s plots to landmarks and routes. All essays and walks are illustrated with sketches by Paul Laseau. These drawings not only illustrate locations for identification but also conjure their atmosphere so that readers engage with how Murdoch’s characters experience their surroundings. The final London Glossary is an annotated index of the London place names mentioned in all of Murdoch’s 26 novels.
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 T...
First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The novels of Iris Murdoch are lively journeys across landscapes teeming with ideas. Such texts as An Accidental Man, The Philosopher's Pupil, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea blend art and philosophy in tales that have intrigued and puzzled readers like few other contemporary novels. In Patterned Aimlessness Barbara Stevens Heusel brings an order and a clarity to the mystery of Murdoch's narrative form. She shows how this writer of many genres came to integrate philosophy, morality, psychology, language, and aesthetics in order to call into question the conventions of the English novel. Following Wittgenstein's lead Murdoch makes palpable the complexities of human experience, the "acc...
Original essays by American and British scholars offer a reader-friendly introduction to the work of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and a dozen other British women writers British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson. British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary s...
With the increasing number of books on contemporary fiction, there is a need for a work that examines whom we value, and why. These questions lie at the heart of this book which, by focusing on four novelists, literary and popular, interrogates the canon over the last fifty years. The argument unfolds to demonstrate that academic trends increasingly control canonicity, as do the demands of genre, the increasing commercialisation of literature, and the power of the literary prize. Turner argues that literary excellence, demonstrated by style and imaginative power, is often missing in many works that have become modern classics and makes a case for the value of the 'universal' in literature. Written in a jargon-free style, with reference to many supporting writers, the book raises a number of significant cultural questions about the arts, fashions and literary reputations, of interest to readers in contemporary literary studies.
A materialist critique of the politics, poetics and economics of suffering in liberalism that argues for attention to the labour of suffering of the victim in many well-meaning but flawed politics of redress, and imagines forms of representation, solidarity and justice that better honour the history and materiality of this labour.
Examining the impact of poststructuralist theories on the writings of four of the most eminent contemporary novelists, this book argues that the postmodern approach to language has given rise to fiction's ongoing exploration of ethics and the relation to the Other. In a globalised world that is marked by cruelty and intolerance, the contemporary novel appears to be preoccupied with ways to explore the reasons for violence and to find alternative ways for reconciliation. This book undertakes an in-depth study of the fiction of four leading contemporary novelists and draws attention to the ideas they share with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Although Levinas's concept of ethics is mainly ba...