Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)

Iris Murdoch ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Anne Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Iris Murdoch is introduced as a writer of brave and open –minded novels that are not only idiosyncratic in their dealing with issues that push against accepted moral and social boundaries but also relevant to the everyday experiences of all types of readers. With reference to significant biographical information the chapter suggests why her novels have carved out her place in British culture in the late twentieth century and outlines the ways in which her often tortuous personal relationships and complex personality are inextricably entwined with her art. The considerable media attention she has attracted since her death in 1999 is evaluated and the reasons for the fluctuations within the critical reception of Murdoch’s novels over four decades are explained. The introduction concludes with summaries of the following four chapters on Murdoch’s philosophy, theology, aesthetics and settings.

Looking Again: The Critical Heritage

2017 ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines Don't Look Now (1973) in the context of Daphne Du Maurier's Gothic narratives, with particular emphasis on those which had previously been adapted to film, and Nicolas Roeg's earlier films, particularly those which deal with themes of trauma and violence. It proposes that Du Maurier and Roeg's works should be read within the context of mid- to late-twentieth-century British culture, considering them as particularly concerned to depict the cultural traumas of the period. Although there are some distinctive differences between the film and the story from which it is adapted, one must not forget that Don't Look Now is adapted from a literary text, and that this may have implications for the representations and adaptations of trauma in contemporary literature and film. The chapter then reviews the existing studies of the film and the story from which it is adapted. It interrogates Don't Look Now's critical heritage as both avoiding and approaching the ever-retreating position of the trauma-text: a simultaneous recognition and avowal of the film's horror and its anxieties.

Stop, Words

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Computer Processing ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The stop list, a list of words excluded from computer processing, is a characteristic artifact of recent times, and its logic is one of the implicit structures of the everyday epistemology of the late twentieth century.

Epilogue

Night Raiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Eloise Moss
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Trauma ◽  
Criminal Enterprise ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Turkish Cypriot ◽  
The City ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In 1965, London-based Turkish-Cypriot author Taner Baybars’ novel A Trap for the Burglar portrayed a metropolitan couple whose marriage was disintegrating through the constant fear of burglary that ruled their lives, eventually making them suspect each other of being the thief. Its motifs of the psycho-sexual trauma inherent in the burglar’s interference in their happy existence anticipated the new legislation enforced under the Theft Act 1968 (still in use today), which explicitly sought to entwine the issues of burglary and rape. Creating a new, severer penalty for burglary-with-rape, it constituted this phenomenon as a distinctive, more serious strand of criminal enterprise. The epilogue considers the legacy of these shifts into the late twentieth century. Night Raiders has sought to demonstrate the depths to which burglary penetrated into the everyday lives of Londoners between 1860 and 1968. Even those who had no direct experience of being burgled were touched by the crime, whether through the accumulation of sensational stories of dramatic burglaries in the press, theatre, and on film, or through the integration of anti-burglar technologies around their homes. Walking around the city at night, catching glimpse of a broken rooftile or a sudden movement near the perimeter of a house, both residents and police would have likely turned their thoughts to thieves.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-242
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The conclusion first summarises the book’s argument about the rise and fall of the ‘history of everyday life’ in British culture between 1918 and 1979. It then considers some educational connections between ‘history from below’ and the ‘history of everyday life’, suggesting that as universities became sites of mass education in the late twentieth-century, academic social history could more easily adopt the language of everyday life. Finally, the conclusion explores synergies between the ‘history of everyday life’ and feminist women’s histories of the 1970s and 1980s, re-asserting the centrality of women to the production and consumption of popular social history in twentieth-century Britain. An important legacy of the mid-century ‘history of everyday life’ is found in campaigns to bring women’s history into schools in London during the 1980s.

Iris Murdoch

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
First Century ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Aesthetic Aspect ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
British Philosopher

This volume takes into account the variety of talents that inform not only Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six best-selling novels, but also her philosophical, theological and critical writing, which together express stringent views on art, politics and morality. It identifies Murdoch as a proudly Anglo-Irish writer whose work straddles the boundary between popular and intellectually serious novels which spanned the entire latter half of the twentieth century. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes and issues that characterise her fiction decade by decade; explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist; explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction by borrowing from the visual arts, drama, poetics and music. The importance of the settings of her homeland of Ireland and her beloved London concludes the study, and while Iris Murdoch is acknowledged throughout as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century she is also presented as one whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology speaks perhaps more urgently to twenty-first century readers than they did to those of the century in which she wrote.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

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