Sentimental Novelists Research Articles

Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern Amy Coté Faye Halpern. Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. 215pp. $45.00 paper. Faye Halpern’s Sentimental Readers offers a nuanced examination of what she terms a “disparaged rhetoric.” This vigorous volume takes up the question of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction by authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Ward Beecher, asking how and why twenty-first-century readers approach these texts, how these approaches might differ from those of nineteenth-century readers, and how we might learn from the “uncritical” practices advocated by sentimental rhetoric. Halpern’s potential audience is broad: this book holds obvious appeal for specialists in nineteenth-century American fiction and rhetoric, but its detailed historical contextualization, careful close readings, engagement with affect and reader response theory, and feminist literary criticism make it a compelling text for scholars from various disciplines, periods, and geographical areas. Furthermore, Halpern’s reflections on and assertions about the role sentimental rhetoric might play in pedagogy makes this book a valuable asset for anyone involved in teaching, especially early years of undergraduate English. Halpern begins her volume by addressing widespread assumptions about sentimental fiction: that it is socially conservative, tied to traditional gender roles, full of derivative plots and forced deathbed conversion scenes, and ultimately a “lesser” form of literature. As Halpern succinctly claims, though, “Certainly, sentimental novels do have favourite plots and themes, but it is a premise of this book that we should see sentimentality as less of a what than a how: how does a sentimental text direct its audience to read?” (xv). Various incarnations of this question and its implication occupy the remainder of Sentimental Readers. Halpern grounds her first chapter in vigorous research and detailed socio-historical context. This chapter, while somewhat lengthy, sets out [End Page 210] the foundational problem encountered by professional rhetoricians and sentimental novelists alike throughout the nineteenth century. Through an investigation of Edwart Tyrrel Channing (1790 to 1856), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Halpern articulates the circular debate surrounding disingenuous eloquence and the potentially dangerous powers of persuasion wielded by public figures. Was the ability to persuade an audience an innate quality, or could it be learned through instruction and study? If the former, what was the function of professorships in rhetoric and oratory; if the latter, how was an audience to tell a true conviction from a manipulative performance? Using Channing’s writings and biography as a springboard, Halpern tackles the complexities of this question, reaching backwards as far as Socrates and forward to the “scribbling women”—the sentimental writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the subject of Halpern’s second chapter. Here, Halpern asks why scholars have not explored connections between professional orators and sentimental writers, who so often use rhetorical strategies in their fiction. Through an examination of The Minister’s Wooing, which she calls Stowe’s “rhetorical manifesto” (34), Halpern tackles the question of disingenuous eloquence as sentimental novelists encountered it. Halpern contends that The Minister’s Wooing employs the conventional love triangle plot to stage a battle between different types of persuasion. A successful orator, according to Stowe, is someone whose outside and inside align perfectly: someone for whom “seeming” and “being” are indistinguishable. Halpern extends this reading into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, addressing what she terms the “paradoxes of sentimentality” (54). Chief among these paradoxes is the way sentimental fiction relies on orality in spite of its textual status—they “speak” and persuade, inspiring strong feelings in audiences both within and beyond the novel through reported speech, apostrophes, and direct appeals. This orality is bound up with a suspicion of the written word as unreliable and prone to conceal and thus implicated in the problem of disingenuous eloquence. As Halpern writes, “far from the medium being the message, the medium is undermined and … transformed by it. The pinnacle of sentimentality saw readers accepting this transformation and being transformed by it in turn” (63). For Stowe, then, characters must exist within the text without belonging exclusively...

The dark side of the Enlightenment: wizards, alchemists, and spiritual seekers in the age of reason

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment-generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion-were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the darker pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy. Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age. Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the Age of Lights into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the Egyptian freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krudener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet. Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.

The Novel as Museum: Curating Memory in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence

This article explores a distinctive mode of narrative, “the novel as museum,” as represented in Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel. Framed via Walter Benjamin's ideas on collecting and urban representation and Pamuk's 2009 Norton Lectures on The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, the article traces a link between Pamuk's fictional museum and its physical counterpart in Istanbul and talks about memories inscribed in everyday objects and urban modernity hidden behind the story.

The naive and the sentimental novelist

What happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a novel create its unique effects, so distinct from those of a painting, a film, or a poem? In this inspired, thoughtful, deeply personal book, Turkey's Nobel Prize winner explores the art of writing, and takes us into the worlds of the reader and the writer, revealing their intimate connections. Pamuk draws on Friedrich Schiller's famous distinction between poets-who write spontaneously, serenely, unselfconsciously - and sentimental poets: those who are reflective, emotional, questioning, and alive to the artifice of the written word. Harking back to his reading of the beloved novels of his youth and ranging through the work of such writers as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Mann, and Naipaul, he explores the oscillation between the naive and the reflective, and the search for an equilibrium, that lie at the center the novelist's craft. Orhan Pamuk ponders the novel's visual and sensual power-its ability to conjure landscapes so vivid they can make the here-and-now fade away. In the course of this exploration, he delves into the secrets of reading and writing, and considers the elements of character, plot, time and setting that compose the sweet illusion of the fictional world. Like Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, this is a perceptive book by one of the modern masters of the art, a title anyone who has known the pleasure of becoming immersed in a novel will enjoy, and learn from.

Sentimental Frauds

The 2006 class action against James Frey, concerning his fabrications inA Million Little Pieces, was the first suit of its kind in the United States. There is nothing new about false memoirs, so what can explain the lawsuit? When the book was promoted on “Oprah's Book Club,” viewers were invited to respond emotionally, and saw their responses as a form of testimony. Those responses produced a sense of betrayal and inauthenticity when Frey's falsehoods were revealed. This view finds support in the eighteenth‐century sentimental novel, which similarly linked readers' reactions to the author's emotional authenticity. Fraud was an ongoing concern for sentimental novelists, some of whom used elaborate editorial to ploys to disavow responsibility for the text, while others populated their novels with fraudulent characters, intended as foils for the protagonist. An investigation of these novels helps to reveal the implications of the Frey case for future claims of literary fraud.

Cataloging Southern Culture at Home and Abroad

The Southern Literary Journal, volume xlii, number 2, fall 2010© 2010 by The Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature. All rights reserved. 149 Cataloging Southern Culture at Home and Abroad by Angie Maxwell Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe–Europe in the American South. Ed. Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Science P, 2007. 599 pp. €65,00 paper. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 9: Literature. Ed. M. Thomas Inge and Charles Reagan Wilson (series editor). Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. xx + 511 pp. $45.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. The two collections under review here attempt to reframe and classify southern culture — especially southern literature — within the modern critical categories of race, gender, transnationalism, psychology , and so forth. While Inge and Wilson’s literature volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture redefines the fundamental themes and authors at the center of southern letters, Gray and Zacharasiewicz’s Transatlantic Exchanges breaks new ground by surveying the mutually constructive relationships of European and southern cultures. As a larger project, Inge and Wilson’s extended and significantly revised multi-­ volume encyclopedia — the original one-­ volume Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published in 1989 — does much more than simply catalog all things southern. Each volume benefits from various critical and scholarly commentaries that map their respective landscapes more objectively and more comprehensively than past attempts. This single volume on literature allows the editors and contributors to 150 Southern Literary Journal incorporate thematic essays that consider such timely topics as “Food in Literature,” “Globalization and Southern Literature,” and “Postsouthern literature.” Each essay represents an integral investigation into what some scholars have labeled the “new southern studies.” Such thematic entries, which comprise nearly a third of the collection, proceed historically and reveal a diverse tradition, often referencing lesser-­ known authors, including sentimental novelists and writers of local color. Some of these minor authors do not have full author entries, which would, of course, substantially increase the length of the volume, but their presence in the thematic essays enriches the scholarly potential of the collection. The individual author entries follow a traditional format, offering a brief synopsis of the authors’ lives and key works. The citation list at the end of each short article provides an excellent tool for undergraduate students who are beginning a research project on any of the included authors . However, the addition of a cross-­ reference list would prove helpful in future editions. For example, students reading an entry on John Crowe Ransom might also be directed to consult entries on “Fugitives and Agrarians,” “New Criticism,” and “The Kenyon Review,” as well as related writers Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Such a list would also benefit those reading the more substantial thematic essays — for example , essays on “Southern Gothic” or “Blues Literature” — who might be encouraged to reference specific author entries. Contemporary writers appear more frequently in the new encyclopedia, as do influential publications and leading academics in the field. One possible addition, in light of the popular critical approaches that measure the cultural significance of space and identity construction, would be the inclusion of important southern literary festivals and events such as the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Oxford Conference for the Book. Transatlantic Exchanges proves both timely and relevant to the emerging concerns of transnationalism, and expands the definition of southern literature by connecting it convincingly, and with numerous specific close readings, to the larger traditions of English, Spanish, French, Norwegian, and even Welsh literature and culture. The core argument of this collection is that the U.S. South has always had a more heterogeneous cultural makeup than scholars have acknowledged. Extending this argument beyond the “many Souths” model that focuses primarily on African Americans and women as southerners, this volume looks to the influence of Latin American and Caribbean cultures on the South, and especially to the transnational and mutually influential relationship between the American South and Europe. Reviews 151 The study of Faulkner comprises two full sections of the volume (considered alongside Thomas Wolfe in some essays). Peter Laurie compares Faulkner’s place in French...

The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820 (review)

The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston., 1780-1820. By Jose R. Torre. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. Pp. 251. Cloth, £66/ $99.00.)Reviewed by Cathy MaisonThe Political Economy of traces the transformation in thinking about that began in late seventeenth-century England and reached maturity before America's market revolution. Jose Torre argues that profound changes in the meanings of value spurred innovations in the paper credit and banking systems of the early national political economy, but he also invites the reader to consider parallel intellectual transformations among New England's Unitarian ministers, sentimental novelists, and decorative artists who articulated new views about value through the concept of sentiment.In Torre's background stand the traditional defenders of the intrinsic value of money (silver and gold), a beggar thy neighbor mercantilist model of commerce, and the regulation of personal behavior in the marketplace. Among them, John Locke is cast not as the herald of liberal individualism, but as an advocate of unchangeable intrinsic value in money. Slowly, under the influence of Scottish Moral Sense writersmost notably David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith-value became changeable, contestable, and conceptually fictitious. Revolutionary Americans more readily accepted currency as a promise to facilitate exchange, an instrument of public trust, and confidence without real value. The true measure of wealth was not the store of money on hand, but the ability of mere paper to satisfy collective individual desires to develop America and consume more.This new view of value proved to be liberating in an infant republic whose citizens were deeply in debt, but also convinced of their tremendous potential for economic and cultural development. Powerful spokesmen pushed the new view of value further and celebrated speculative investments, expansive individual consumption, and an infinite system of paper credit, all of which, they insisted, would knit together large networks of investors and consumers in mountains of confidence and trust.Yet because paper credit was fictitious, and Americans had lost the security of attachment to the British commercial empire and fixed traditional political authority, some kind of glue was necessary to hold together otherwise discretely associated individuals in this new world of value. Sentiment would be the glue to ease disquietude about the unbridled self-interest, and it would provide New Englanders with an epistemology based on feelings (56). In the form of sympathy or benevolence, Adam Smith's impartial spectator knew what was morally right by imagining himself in the place of the other whom he was judging; an internal moral sentiment would bind individuals in a system of natural liberty that had little place for the constraints of mercantilism and much potential for the satisfaction of wants and needs.Torre is less effective in addressing a central conundrum in early national political economy: the failure of lofty ideals-in this case, sentiment-to play out in the reality of contentious interests. Surely, regulation, restraint, and paternalism persisted in disputes over cultural authority, but Torre provides only a few glimpses of discussions about commercial protection and internal improvements. He demonstrates that many key economic thinkers, among them Jonathan Witherspoon, Ben Franklin, William Barton, James Sullivan, and Mathew Carey (whose name is consistently misspelled), were excited about facilitating the new nation's liquid credit and enlarging public confidence in banks, and hence the nation's sympathetic social bonds. …

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

Reviewed by: The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere Caroline Levander The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. By Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp. $49.50. In this highly intelligent and elegantly written book, Elizabeth Maddox Dillon makes the important observation that U.S. liberalism depends upon the concept of gender for its successful functioning and, more particularly, that women's private status has been integral to liberalism since its inception. As Dillon goes on to make clear, such an observation is of immediate importance to those interested in American literary and political cultures, as well as to those working in political theory and feminist studies. Feminist critics, for example, have tended to argue that "liberalism is flawed insofar as it excludes women," but Dillon shows that "while it is indeed the case that the figure of the woman within liberalism often stands opposed to the autonomous, white male liberal subject," "this opposition is itself crucial to liberal thought and culture" (3). Such a shift in thinking about gender and liberalism simultaneously locates women firmly within the broad conceptual history of liberalism and reveals liberalism's deep dependence on those female citizens it seems to exclude. Further, such an analysis reorganizes familiar histories of liberalist theory, as Dillon demonstrates when she explains how early liberalist rhetoric was at work in both Ann Hutchinson's trial and Winthrop's strategic representations of it to an English public upon whom the Massachusetts Bay Colony depended for resources. After an adeptly argued introductory chapter on gender, liberal theory, and the literary public sphere, Dillon moves to a consideration of how the antinomian controversy, which has long been seen as repressing women, actually involved an intricate and extended negotiation of women's political power. Showing that the antinomian controversy marks the beginning of an institutionalization of liberalism, rather than its repression, Dillon persuasively locates U.S. liberalism's origins much earlier in the nation's history than is usually assumed. Such a rehistoricizing of liberalism—one that shows the centrality of women's assumption of prominence to the evolution of a liberal public sphere—is followed by a chapter on the importance of marriage to a developing U.S. political culture. Showing a correlation between marriage's development into an increasingly intensive relation between individuals and political culture's increasing decentralization, Dillon makes the important observation that marriage shores up liberalist structures by emphasizing heterosexual desire and thus emphasizing sexual difference. As she argues, consensual marriage's primary condition "seems to be the cultivation of desire for a partner defined in sex specific terms: one need not only find a partner of the opposite sex, but it is precisely their sex—their manliness or womanliness—that one must find desirable" (129). It is sentences like this that make The Gender of Freedom a pleasure to read. In her fourth and final chapter on sentiment and sociality, Dillon explores four infanticide narratives that precede and, she argues, help to produce nineteenth-century sentimental novelists' primary concern with the mother-child bond. Moving from marriage to motherhood, this chapter argues that the repeated trope of the [End Page 208] dead child in sentimental fiction works to "produce the freedom of the liberal subject through [the] affective abundance" created by the child's death (203). While it is certainly true that child death is a prominent theme in sentimental fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the fact that maternal death and orphanage seem equally important elements of other popular novels raises an important and unexplored question about female mortality's impact on liberalism. Similarly, the interest of this chapter in infanticide narratives brings to mind the many slave narratives that depict a slave mother's desire to kill her offspring as an act of maternal nurture, and one wonders, finally, about the place of racial identity within the model of gender and liberalism that Dillon generates. It is, no doubt, the case that women engaged with the gendered dynamics of a developing liberalist ideal in distinct ways, based on other constituting elements of their social identities. Yet a brief consideration of...

Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship

SUE, I BELIEVE IF YOU WOULD TRY, YOU COULD WRITE A STORY. Thus, according to her sister Anna, did Warner's Aunt Fanny unceremoniously suggest that she write a novel. Anna then qualified this anecdote: Whether she added 'that would sell,' I am not sure; of course that was what she meant.' The less pragmatic version of this account appeals to the image of Warner as a sentimental novelist. It seems appropriate to locate the genesis of her authorship in a conversation between aunt and niece that, in its emphasis on success through trying, tacitly encodes the virtues of discipline and selfsuffering that inform Warner's The Wide, Wide World. Fanny's implicit assumption about marketability, however, is equally important to an understanding of this genesis. Susan had always had literary ambitions, reported George Haven Putnam, son of Warner's original publisher, but it was the pressure for money that constituted the immediate incentive to the writing of 'The Wide, Wide World.' 2 The financial constraints that prompted Warner to write continued to influence her throughout her career. Her financial stability depended on her success as a sentimental novelist, a success due in turn to her responsiveness to the desires of her readers. These readers expressed

"So Much Sin": The Decline of Religious Discipline and The "Tidal Wave of Crime"

Historians agree that churches played an important role in policing society in colonial America. Church discipline fell into disuse at different times in different regions. In their studies of Massachusetts, David Konig and William E. Nelson found that law replaced religion before the Revolution. Randolph Roth documented the survival of church discipline in Vermont well into the nineteenth century. In the South church discipline hung on even longer. As Edward Ayers wrote, churches maintained their role as police and courts of first resort throughout the nineteenth century.1 An examination of criminal prosecutions in churches as well as secular courts in Trigg County, Kentucky, and the surrounding agricultural region known as the Black Patch (for the dark type of tobacco grown there) indicates that the prosecution of crime in the late 1800s intensified because prosecutions shifted from church courts to secular courts, as the old church-based system of keeping order broke down. For a society used to religious discipline, civil courts seemed inadequate. Not long after religious discipline declined in the Black Patch vigilantism broke out. Church discipline survived in the South longer than in the North in part because of the nature of southern crime. David Konig attributed the decline of religious discipline in Puritan Massachusetts to an influx of commercial activity. However, the nature of crime is not just a function of urbanization. Even in cities like New Orleans and Charleston southerners resorted to personal assault more often than northerners.2 In his study of law and lawlessness in Massachusetts and South Carolina, Michael Hindus argued that South Carolinians committed crimes of violence while Massachusetts criminals preferred to commit crimes against property.3 Southern crime grew out of personal relationships and emo? tional lapses; in the North, crime was less personal. Churches could more effectively counsel and police a wayward member of the community than a professional criminal.4 As historian Randolph Roth has noted, deciphering why church discipline fell into disuse when it did is a difficult task. No one advocated ending discipline. The public's shifted. Changes in something so nebulous as the national mood are almost impossible to document.5 However, several historians have written that a rise of replacing the harshly judgmental Calvinism previously dominant, flourished at least by the 1850s.6 Popular literature (including Uncle Tom's Cabin) promoted sentimentalism, which was also a reaction against urban anomie.7 Sentimentalists exposed middle-class readers to the poor and degraded the same people Calvinists had condemned as unworthy of sympathy. One sentimental novelist wrote, My purpose is to bring to the view of my

William Godwin as Novelist (review)

130Philosophy and Literature William Godwin as Novelist, by B. J. Tysdahl; 205 pp. Adeuitic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981, $31.50. Hazlitt characterized William Godwin's PoliticalJustice approvingly, in terms that Swift might have used in A Tale ofa Tub: "He absolves man from die gross euid narrow ties of sense, custom, audiority, private and local attachment, in order diat he may devote himself to die boundless pursuit of universal benevolence. Mr. Godwin gives no quarter to die amiable weaknesses of our nature .... Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way . . . [to] die disinterested love of good and the dictates of inflexible justice, which is "the law of laws, and sovereign of sovereigns." Godwin's equivocal flight from die Sandemanian Calvinism of his youth seems to have led him into the lukewarm embraces of Houyhnhnm rationality, an unpromising sensibility for an aspiring novelist. Yet he wrote nine novels, one of which, Caleb WiUiams, has a secure position among the minor classics of English fiction. The dustjacket promises that Professor Tysdahl will examine Godwin's novels "in relation to his works of political phdosophy . . . bringing together both sides of Godwin's oeuvre." Instead, he surveys Godwin's career as a novelist, and makes a convincing case for Godwin's limited but real talent and success. He treats briefly five of Godwin's minor novels as either derivative apprentice works or unfortunate lapses ofold age. The heart of his essay consists of four chapters devoted to the major novels of Godwin's prime: Caleb WiUiams, St. Leon, Fleetwood, emd Mandeville. His analysis focuses on die ways in which Godwin adapted existing novelistic conventions and strategies — particularly those of Richardson and the Godiic and Sentimental novelists — to his own political and psychological purposes. Conventional happy endings with dieir weddings and settlements for life would not do for Godwin, who had attacked both marriage and property in Political Justice. Nor could he employ the supernaturedism of the Gothic widiout running afoul of his professed atheism and material determinism. Professor Tysdahl thus argues that Godwin's major accomplishment as a novelist was to open fruitful lines of development for later naturalistic and Marxist writers. Professor Tysdahl's reading of Caleb Williams is die least satisfying of his major chapters. His attempt to account for the novel's power by suggesting that it is simultaneously a revolutionary political allegory, a conventional religious allegory, and a penetrating psychological study, all brought into coherence by die reader's "flickering" perception of shifting "figure and ground," sheds litde light on die sources of die novel's real strengths, particularly its fine plotting. The three chapters on St. Leon, Fleetwood, and Mandeville are more illuminating, especially his discussion of Godwin's experiments with narrators who are only occasionally sane, and his provocative linking of Godwin and Foucault on madness and civilization. Professor Tysdahl tends to assert more of Godwin's successes dian he demonstrates, and he speculates too much about Godwin's artistic and didactic intentions instead of dealing with die realized effects in the novels. Finally, the book is heavily earnest and partisan , lacking, like Godwin's own writing, a sense of irony and proportion. We are told, for example, diat "Falkland and Caleb fail because diey belong to a society not permeated by trudi and sincerity andjustice" (p. 38). As an explanation this may be heartfelt, but it is not helpful. It is, however, too nearly typical ofthe style of William Godwin as Novelist, a Reviews131 book which is too simple as criticism to appeal to specialists, and too speciedized in its focus to appeal to a more general audience. Willamette UniversityWilbur S. Braden Iris Murdoch: Workfor the Spirit, by Elizabeth Dipple; xii & 356 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, $25.00. Why is it that some readers find Iris Murdoch's novels so irritating, even unreadable, while odiers find diem so irresistibly compelling? There are superficial explanations no doubt but Professor Dipple, in this exemplary and profound study of die Murdoch literary oeuvre, carefully tracks down the more complex sources of irritation and fascination alike. Some readers, teased by die glittering surface realism ofdie novels, recoil at the unescapable allusive undercurrent: invariably disturbing, uncomfortable, unconsoling. Dipple acknowledges...