Call For Papers: Special Edition of the Iris Murdoch Review
The Iris Murdoch Review 16 – to be published in October 2025 – will be a special edition dedicated to the work of North American and North American adjacent scholars.
Author: Robert Cremins
A Clockwork Iris
Murdoch’s notable 1961 essay ‘Against Dryness’ introduces the idea of the ‘written’ novel – a line of argument that is an instance of the ‘confident, ambitious breadth of reference’ Peter J. Conradi mentions in his preface to Existentialists and Mystics:
Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.
Malcolm Bradbury as Murdoch Critic
At first glance, Malcolm may seem like a surprising choice as a guide to Murdoch’s novels, because he is best remembered—or so the anecdotal evidence I have gathered suggests—as a Murdoch parodist rather than critic.