ABSTRACT
Eco’s rst novel, The Name of the Rose (1983), a medieval crime novel, is a prime example of the ‘open’ work, operating on several levels and containing a ctional embodiment of the reader, and of reading practices, in the form of the detective-monk William of Baskerville. The Name of the Rose was, as Eco indicates in his Postscript to ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1994), a deliberate attempt to write a postmodern novel and it has, along with his subsequent novels, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989) and The Island of the Day Before (1995), been taken up by postmodern theorists as a prime example of the form. [PW]
See also Chapter 11.
