This study argues that Murdoch's plots and characters are motivated by the question of the past. Drawing on many of her key works, and providing an analysis of her "first person retrospective" novels as a separate group within the larger body of her fiction, the author also considers Murdoch's relation to key currents within 20th-century thought, such as modernism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it. This argument was given an extra resonance by the death of Murdoch after Alzheimer's disease in 1999, when the book was first published - a curious blurring of life and work typical of the posthumous reassessment of Murdoch. This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original ( The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , and The Philosopher's Pupil ) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters covering Murdoch's most important and popular novels, considering in more depth her relationship with the dominant literary and intellectual currents of her time.

"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.

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it. This argument was given an extra resonance by the death of Murdoch after Alzheimer's disease in 1999, when the book was first published a curious blurring of life and work typical of the posthumous reassessment of Murdoch. This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original (The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and The Philosopher's Pupil) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters covering Murdoch's most important and popular novels, considering in more depth her relationship with the dominant literary and intellectual currents of her time. MARKET 1: Postgraduates and scholars of Post-War British Fiction; Literature and Ethics; Philosophy and Literature; Women's Writing; Contemporary Writing; Iris Murdoch devotees MARKET 2: General readers

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.