Gothic Elements in Iris Murdoch’s Postmodern Novels after the 1970

Abstract

In her works, Iris Murdoch remained faithful to the traditions of English literature. A Gothic novel that used the archaic mythology of the British Isles: Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, medieval Christian mysticism in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century remained one of the few life-giving sources for the preservation and development of the novel genre, which the writer thought about in her essays. In the later novels The Black Prince (1973), A Word Child (1975) and The Sea, the Sea (1978), Murdoch widely uses Gothic elements to study the psychology the modern man and the problems facing him in society. The article examines in detail the spatio-temporal organization of the neo-Gothic Murdoch novels and the typology of the images of classical villains. Gothic makes Murdoch novels attractive to the general reader and allows her to preach her philosophical views.