Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination

This volume is the third volume in Palgrave’ Macmillan’s new Iris Murdoch Today scholarly series.

Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination is the first major collection of literary essays since her centenary in 2019. It brings together leading Murdoch scholars from across the world who expand the boundaries of recent criticism offering work not only on the novels, but on her unpublished poetry and archival materials. This collection discusses her interest in, and use of, Japanese literature; her relationship with, and reader-response to her, in Australia; Murdoch in the post #metoo era; her lifelong interest in the supernatural, same-sex relationships and friendships; as well as the use and abuse of biographical material. The collection widens the field of Murdoch studies and marks a new waypoint in the development of her critical reception.

Miles Leeson is the Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. He is the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, Incest and Contemporary Literature (2018) and the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019).

Frances White is Visiting Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and Writer in Residence at Kingston University Writing School. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch and other writers, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, T.S. Eliot and Stevie Smith. Her prize-winning biography Becoming Iris Murdoch was published by Kingston University Press in 2014.