Iris Murdoch Summary

Biography EssayOne of the dominant figures of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch continues to divide the critics; for example, one of the professors of English at Cambridge University, Frank Ker... Read more

One of the dominant figures of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch continues to divide the critics; for example, one of the professors of English at Cambridge University, Frank Kermode, thinks hi... Read more

Iris Murdoch is far more well known as a novelist, philosopher, and literary critic than as a playwright; her reputation and significance in twentieth-century literature rests largely on her twenty-si... Read more

Critical Essay by Lorna Sage It is difficult to chart Iris Murdoch's progress, if only because she has a gift for making the variety of possible plots and characters seem inexhaustible. The res... Read more

Critical Essay by Joyce Carol Oates Though Iris Murdoch has defined the highest art as that which reveals and honors the minute, "random" detail of the world, and reveals it together wit... Read more

Critical Essay by Howard German [Miss Murdoch's] novels are copiously endowed with details; however, these details are not selected solely to satisfy the demands of realism…. [Her] ficti... Read more

Critical Essay by Ann Gossman "Can one have relations with a severed head?" Iris Murdoch herself raises this most provocative question in her novel [A Severed Head]. Obligingly, Murdoch ... Read more

Critical Essay by Reid Beddow Murdoch intimidates not because she is so good or so prolific a writer but because she is also a working philosopher. One feels there must be some metaphysical system tha... Read more

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Dipple Although Murdoch argues against Plato on several points, it is nevertheless clear that her sense of the integrity of art reflects his injunction that fantasy and sop... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Taubman George [is the title character of The Philosopher's Pupil], and a somewhat hypothetical figure, a product of the ideas in the novel. He has a reputation for bei... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Eder Iris Murdoch is a conjuring kind of novelist. Her characters are upper middle class, mostly, with a sprinkling of intellectuals, artists and assorted Bohemians. Their la... Read more

Critical Essay by William H. Pritchard [In The Philosopher's Pupil], as always with reading Iris Murdoch, there is much that is entertaining, things which—like the discussion of a Mallar... Read more