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.

BRAN NICOL is Lecturer in English at University College, Chichester.

Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch's Realism Iris Murdoch and the Insistence of the Past Author and Hero: Murdoch's First -Person Retrospective Novels Reading Past Truth: Under the Net and The Black Prince The Writing Cure: A Severed Head and A Word Child The Ambivalence of Coming Home: The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea Notes Bibliography Index