Angol
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
