Title: Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch’s Realism
Abstract: Iris Murdoch is an eccentric writer. Besides the oddity of her characters, their world and the plots they get wrapped up in (a strangeness that nevertheless taps into something in ourselves we all recognize) her fiction seems to position itself outside the central patterns of the post-war British novel. Her novels are difficult to place in any particular category (realism, comedy of manners, prose romance, metaphysical thriller, 'late modernism'), seeming to constitute one all by themselves. In her philosophy and literary theory, Murdoch consistently takes up an unfashionable position: she is a metaphysician in an age suspicious of metaphysics, a novelist who wishes to preserve the function of literary realism in a period marked by the 'crisis of representation'. While the generation of late twentieth-century writers to which she belongs is more self-conscious about their art and the ideas which inform it than any previous one, Murdoch's status as a philosopher in her own right gives unusual emphases to her own self-awareness.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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