AustLit

'The mid-century novelist has often been regarded as occupying an ambiguous intermediary period, lost somewhere in the no-man's-land between modernism and postmodernism. This book challenges this view by proposing that many of the period's most significant writers - Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Patrick White, and Saul Bellow - were united by a distinct and common concern: to return the increasingly interior novel to the world, and, by extension, to ethical engagement. They did this not by reviving the now-antiquated nineteenth-century realist novel, but by devising a new type of novel, one concerned with unveiling a transcendent Good that exists outside of the spheres of society, politics, and the individual will. To do this, without ignoring the philosophical ideas that had led to the novel's apparent impoverishment - the opacity of language, and the loss of stable external sources of meaning - they drew upon techniques and concepts from the canon of mystical literature: a body of writing that had long been devising methods of approaching the ineffable through literary means' (Publisher website).