Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. D51546/84.

Th. doct.--Littérature anglaise--Paris--Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1997 (le 21 novembre). / Bibliogr. Index.

No description available.

Thesis--University of Florida. / Description based on print version record. Typescript. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 170-176.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Iris Murdoch believes she writes in the English realist tradition and cites the creation of real characters as the main problem which confronts the modern novelist. Yet her own characterization, which this work explores (in relation to her aesthetics and moral philosophy) provides her greatest contribution to the development of the novel.An understanding of Murdoch's concept of characterization requires a knowledge of her philosophical heritage, its metaphysics, and consideration of the resulting theory of man with his capacity for reason, for communication, and for approaching truth. Accordingly, chapter I of this work introduces the critical writings which provide the theoretical background for Murdoch's characterization.Chapter II examines the factors which influence man's consciousness, thus establishing the difficulty which the change of consciousness proposed by Murdoch for moral development presents. These factors include the contingency of life, the loss of common religious background, man's historic past, and the inadequacy of language for communication.Chapter III considers the elements denoting man's moral status and development, as revealed through characterization, and concludes that Murdoch's characters reveal a degree of vision consistent with their moral status. Included here are characters from the twenty-one Murdoch novels who display six different levels of spiritual awareness: the Good, the nearly Good, the nice, the mediocre with knowledge, the fat egoists, and the black figures.Chapter IV considers the treatment of aesthetics and its relationship to moral philosophy within three novels which discuss writing, portrait painting, and the theatre at length: The Black Prince, The Sandcastle, and The Sea, The Sea.Finally, three appendices are intended to serve as useful sources for both Murdoch readers and scholars. Appendix A contains the bibliography of primary sources and some two hundred critical works about Murdoch's writing; Appendix B is a subject index for the topics common to the sources in the bibliography; Appendix C-is an annotated character index and guide for the twenty-one Murdoch novels to date.

This thesis considers the significance of the neurotic figure in six novels by Iris Murdoch. The novels used in this study are: An Accidental Man, The Bell, Bruno's Dream, The Nice and the Good, The Time of the Angels, and The Unicorn. This study identifies the recurring character type and establishes traits common to all Murdoch neurotic figures. These characters are discussed in terms of neurotic qualities, spiritual and physical isolation, and their ability to control their fellow characters' actions.This work also discusses the neurotic figure, who is unable to recognize others as separate from himself, as illustrative of the self-centered society which Iris Murdoch believes to exist today.

Murdoch considers herself a 'Christian fellow-traveller', 'a kind of Platonist' and a 'sort of Buddhist', all of which summarise her spirit of writing very well. Iris Murdoch places a very serious obligation on the artist to present reality to his/her observers/readers. In almost all her philosophical articles, books, and interviews, she expresses with great emphasis the task of art, especially prose literature, as a form of education for moral development. In that sense, we can call her a moralist and a 'philosophical' novelist. With her 'Novels of the Good' Iris Murdoch is inviting the reader for a 'journey into the iris', saying: 'I am the Iris; come into me and see. ' The message of her novels is not of 'philosophy' but of everyday moral reality. In other words, reading Murdochian novels is reading morals. This is the main argument in this study. The moral education (preception) of the reader by Iris Murdoch is to 'realise' (receive) the 'perception' of the other--hence the title of the thesis--through her 'novels of character'. For Murdoch, appreciating a work of art is no different than knowing another person(s). The good artist and the good person have, in that respect, the same moral discipline. And this disciplined attention brings with it the true perception and clarity and morally right behaviour. The reader has to attend with moral responsibility to the work of art because it is through literature that s/he can enlarge his/her vision and inner space. The thesis is divided into two main sections: the moral precepts and their exemplification as concrete everyday examples in her novels themselves. The Introduction provides the 'philosophical' and theoretical background for Murdoch's 'Novels of the Good'. Included here is a dictionary of some of the major 'concepts', or rather 'precepts' that Murdoch uses both in her novels and her philosophical articles and books, in order to train her reader to gain ethical vision. Also included in this chapter is a section on reading and readers through structuralist and reader-oriented theories in contrast to or comparison with Murdoch's conception/perception of the 'reader' in her novels. Chapter I switches on the 'machine', Murdoch's &camera-eye' on the egoistic human 'psyche', which Murdoch likens to a machine. Chapter 11 discusses this 'machine' in close-up, that is through first-person narrative novels. Chapter 111, which includes novels that have philosophers at the centre, throws a 'light' on philosophy and everyday reality. Chapter IV explores the importance of death in everyday life. However, although the chapters are divided under different titles, the novels discussed in each chapter can be related to the rest as Murdoch discusses the same precepts recurrently in different contexts which gives her novels the 'serial' characteristic. Each novel is part of the reader's pilgrimage to the Good to understand his/her limitations in the face of the contingent reality represented in her fiction through free individual characters. To enter the Murdochland is to enter the cycle of 'arriving at not arriving'.