Description: 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 twentieth-century thought: postmodernism and poststructuralism, Bakhtin, modernism and psychoanalysis.

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