Iris Murdoch's paradoxical novels

by Barbara Stevens Heusel

"Critics have compared Iris Murdoch's comic plots to Shakespeare's and have put her name forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature; her novels have been translated into twenty-nine languages; and no less a critic than Harold Bloom has said of her "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch's eminence." Collecting the major critics who have described for the last third of a century the phenomena of Iris Murdoch's fiction, this study analyzes the stories her critics tell about her artistic processes. Murdoch passed away in February 1999 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's Disease, and now it seems time to examine her critical reception. There are three major questions at the heart of this reception and at the heart of the present study: to what extent is Murdoch a philosophical novelist, a realistic novelist, a postmodern novelist? The book also deals with the question of Murdoch's reputation in the literary world: an intriguing question in view of the praise