Choice 評論
Author of Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch's Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (CH, May'96), Heusel here surveys the major currents of critical response to Murdoch's 26 novels and her reputation as one of Britain's most prominent 20th-century novelists. While acknowledging the diversity of Murdoch's influences and fictional strategies, Heusel centers her discussion on three principal concerns: the writer as philosophical novelist, as latter-day realist, and as postmodernist. At the same time, Heusel offers a host of other perspectives--comedy of manners, parable, picaresque, gothic, detective fiction, fantasy, epistolary, and magic realism. She organizes the discussion chronologically, offering even-handed summaries of divergent points of view and refusing to impose artificial resolutions where none exists. A welcome addition to the growing body of Murdoch scholarship, this volume will be a key resource for those beginning their investigations of the writer's rich oeuvre. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. D. W. Madden California State University, Sacramento