Product Description: Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study...read more

Product Description: Bran Nicol explores the works of Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) as well as the “very quiet dark place” she inhabited in her last years. Piero adds his striking original illustrations. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it. This argument was given an extra resonance by the death of Murdoch after Alzheimer's disease in 1999, when the book was first published - a curious blurring of life and work typical of the posthumous reassessment of Murdoch. This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original ( The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , and The Philosopher's Pupil ) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters covering Murdoch's most important and popular novels, considering in more depth her relationship with the dominant literary and intellectual currents of her time.

Product Description: Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader is the first book to collect together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates: what are its characteristics? Which novels and authors belong to the category? Does it even deserve to be a category on its own? From which traditions does it emerge? How does it relate to previous forms of the novel and to other aspects of postmodern culture?While discussion of the contemporary novel has been dominated by the question of postmodernism, developments in contemporary fiction are also central to the wider debate about postmodernism...read more

Product Description: It scares—and titillates—in such movies as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Basic Instinct. It violently ended the lives of legendary artists such as Selena and John Lennon, and thousands of people endure it daily in anonymity from ex-lovers and strangers...read more