The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch worked in the UNRRA camps, and her early novels are crowded with exiles, refugees and displaced persons. It is suggested that Murdoch's early writings are an attempt to grasp the elusive figure that appears inbetween the withdrawal and the granting of rights: the refugee or displaced person, or, as Murdoch would probably put it, the human individual. The refugee in Murdoch's writing becomes not only a limit concept of political, juridical and speaking life, but of fiction too, and of the very possibility of a moral novel-writing. This chapter turns its attention to literary ethics in Murdoch through The Flight from the Enchanter. Where Murdoch's love ultimately depends on the unpredictable hazards of the liberal self, Franz Baermann Steiner's ethics are those of the ritual and taboo that were his subjects of study and his grounds for belief.
Keywords: love, refugee, Iris Murdoch, literary ethics, Flight from Enchanter, Franz Baermann Steiner
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
