Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London is a celebration of Iris Murdoch’s love for London and establishes her amongst distinguished “London writers” such as William Blake, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Individual chapters focus on the City, London art galleries and museums, the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Whitehall and the River Thames. Each chapter identifies intricate links between the environment and human consciousness and is accompanied by a corresponding walk that links Murdoch’s plots to landmarks and routes. All essays and walks are illustrated with sketches by Paul Laseau. These drawings not only illustrate locations for identification but also conjure their atmosphere so that readers engage with how Murdoch’s characters experience their surroundings. The final London Glossary is an annotated index of the London place names mentioned in all of Murdoch’s 26 novels.

Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land - a collection of articles that deal with Holy Places from Antiquity to the present; from the lands of the Fertile Crescent to Europe, India, Japan and Mexico; from mountains and seas to temples, cities and countries; from the construction, perception and functioning of sacred sites to the psychotic breakdowns they bring on some visitors.

Quraeshi provides a vision of Islam in South Asia enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. An account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia.

The insightful studies contained in this book will be of significant value to anyone interested in experiencing more deeply the intersections between materiality and spirituality. Part 1 introduces readers into Egyptian, Israelite, Christian, and Hindu temples, shrines, or sanctuaries. Part 2 helps readers understand how items of colored fabrics, clothing, robes, and veils, convey ritual meanings. Part 3 reports two panel discussions that exemplify the pathway of fruitful conversation. Matter and spirit might seem to some to be polar opposites. But as these studies by distinguished and diverse scholars demonstrate, spiritual experiences are constructively defined and refined within the coordinates of place and time. Sacred space, as well as sacred cloth, define borders, but not necessarily boundaries, between the sacred and the profane. These material coordinates physically enclose and also spiritually disclose. They both symbolize and synergize, as they encompass and expansively inspire. These original and enjoyable presentations will help all readers to hold tenaciously to the tenets and also the tensions inherent in physical spiritual experiences.

Iris Murdoch was both a popular and intellectually serious novelist, whose writing life spanned the latter half of the twentieth century. A proudly Anglo-Irish writer who produced twenty-six best-selling novels, she was also a respected philosopher, a theological thinker and an outspoken public intellectual. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes that characterise her fiction decade by decade, explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist, explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction. While Iris Murdoch is acknowledged here as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, she is also presented as a figure whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology has immense resonance for twenty-first-century readers.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels – chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) – which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Weinberger’s private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch’s creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.