Rowe, Anne

About the author: Anne Rowe is a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University where she teaches in the English Department and she has also taught in the English Department at Reading University. She is the European Editor of the Iris Murdoch Society Newsletter.

Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch

2002 0-7734-7288-6
Reveals the visual arts as vital inspiration for many thematic and formal aspects of Iris Murdoch's fiction. It relates the paintings that appear in the novels to her experimentation with form, her attempts at rendering consciousness and to her philosophy. Finally, a study of characters who experience spiritual revelations in front of famous paintings endorses the centrality of the sublime in Murdoch's fiction and demonstrates how painting serves to liberate characters and readers alike from an illusory fantasy world. With illustrations.