The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark

ISBN-13: 9780748637690 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 160 str.

Michael Gardiner;Willy Maley

Opis

This Companion brings together an international 'Brodie set' of critics to trace the history, impact, reception and major themes of Spark's work, from her early poetry to her last novel. It encompasses the range of Spark's output, pursuing contextual lines of approach including biography, geography, gender, identity, nation and religion, and considering her legacy and continuing influence in the twenty-first century. Spark emerges here as a serious thinker on issues as diverse as the Welfare State, secularisation, decolonisation, and anti-psychiatry, and a writer whose work may be placed alongside Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and Lessing.
The critics collected here are mindful of how, although overwhelmingly known as a novelist, by the time of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, Spark already had a significant profile through poetry, biographical criticism, and literary journalism, as chair of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, and as author or co-author of a number of scholarly studies of writers including Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Cardinal Newman, and John Masefield. Within a relatively modest space this Companion touches on the whole range of Spark's work and, in introducing the oeuvre thematically for those looking to explore this elegant and challenging author further, also sets the agenda for future Spark studies.
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Spis treści

Series Editors' Preface; Brief Biography of Muriel Spark; Introduction, Michael Gardiner and Willy Maley; 1 Muriel Spark and the Problems of Biography, David Goldie; 2 Poetic Perception in the Fiction of Muriel Spark, Vassiliki Kolocotroni; 3 Body and State in Spark's Early Fiction, Michael Gardiner; 4 The Stranger Spark, Marilyn Reizbaum; 5 Muriel Spark and the Politics of the Contemporary, Adam Piette; 6 Spark, modernism and postmodernism, Matthew Wickman; 7 Muriel Spark as Catholic Novelist, Gerard Carruthers; 8 Muriel Spark's Break with Romanticism, Paddy Lyons; 9 The Post-war Contexts of Spark's Writing, Randall Stevenson; 10 Muriel Spark's Crimes of Wit, Drew Milne; Endnotes; Further Reading; Notes on Contributors; Index.