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Article: Iris Murdoch's Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Yearbook of English Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Iris Murdoch's Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception. By BARBARA STEVENS HEUSEL. (Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture: Literary Criticism in Perspective) Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2001. xi + 185 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]; $55. ISBN: 1-57113-089-6.
Iris Murdoch's novels have always defied classification. Despite her fondness for dualisms in her theoretical discussions of the novel (crystalline/journalistic, open/closed), her fictions disturb such tidy divisions, which are best seen as heuristic devices that enabled her to explore wide-ranging arguments about what she saw as the key dilemmas ...