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.

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader is the first book to collect together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates: what are its characteristics? Which novels and authors belong to the category? Does it even deserve to be a category on its own? From which traditions does it emerge? How does it relate to previous forms of the novel and to other aspects of postmodern culture?While discussion of the contemporary novel has been dominated by the...

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,...

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,...

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.

D.M. Thomas is one of the most controversial writers of our time - considered by some a major voice in contemporary fiction, by others a dubious literary 'impostor' who repeatedly appropriates female sexuality, the holocaust and the work of other writers for personal gain. Though best known for his best-selling novel The White Hotel, he has written twelve other novels and is also an acclaimed poet and translator of Russian literature. This, the first book-length study of his work, suggests that what troubles people about Thomas' work is the way it presents literature as a complex process of...

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers...

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and true crime, crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer...