Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Prologue
- 1 Life-Stories: Redeeming the Past
- 2 Half-Worlds: Writing Against Conversion
- 3 Beyond Orthodoxy: Death, Demons and Singularity
- 4 Transfigurations: Edinburgh, London, Jerusalem
- 5 Machine-Made Parables: From Satire to Absurdity
- 6 International Messes: Between Life and Art
- 7 Hauntings: The Return of the Repressed
- 8 Continuities and Discontinuities
- Postscript: The Facts of Blood
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Prologue
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Prologue
- 1 Life-Stories: Redeeming the Past
- 2 Half-Worlds: Writing Against Conversion
- 3 Beyond Orthodoxy: Death, Demons and Singularity
- 4 Transfigurations: Edinburgh, London, Jerusalem
- 5 Machine-Made Parables: From Satire to Absurdity
- 6 International Messes: Between Life and Art
- 7 Hauntings: The Return of the Repressed
- 8 Continuities and Discontinuities
- Postscript: The Facts of Blood
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Although some of her poetry and criticism is explored, this book will be primarily concerned with Muriel Spark's fiction, which includes twenty-one novels, from The Comforters (1957) to Aiding and Abetting (2000), and over thirty short stories. During a career which has spanned more than fifty years, her fictional output is rightly considered to be one of the most sustained and innovative contributions to the British novel since the war. At the same time, she has been consistently marginalized by being labelled as a ‘Catholic writer ’. For this reason, critical responses to her work have often focused on her as an unchanging moralist as if the issues which she addresses have remained the same. This study aims to question this approach by showing the extent to which Spark's conversion to Roman Catholicism did not, as many assume, transform her personal and literary sense of otherness. Instead, this book will focus on her playful and anarchic fiction, which disrupts the certainties of her supposedly stable identity as a ‘Catholic writer’.
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- Information
- Muriel Spark , pp. xi - xiiPublisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000