Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death PDF Download

Author: Cairns Craig
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474447228
Category : Christianity and existentialism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Proposes that Christian existentialism and, in particular, the work of Søren Kierkegaard, helped shape Spark's religious commitments and her artistic innovations. Because of the prominence, after the Second World War, of the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, it is often forgotten that existentialism was originally a Christian philosophy, shaped by followers of Kierkegaard such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. The author traces in Spark's writings both the influence of Kierkegaard and of Spark's resistance to Sartre's co-option of existentialism to an atheistic agenda. Kierkegaard's analysis of the nature of the "aesthetic" as a false mode of existence that has to be transcended by the ethical and then by the religious provides a fundamental structure for Spark's satirical analyses of the failings of the modern world.

Author: Brent Little
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813236657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Acts of Faith and Imagination wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists readers to reflect critically on the question: "what is faith?" To speak of a person's "faith-life" is to speak of change and development. As a narrative form, literature can illustrate the dynamics of faith, which remains in flux over the course of one's life. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), it inevitably has a narrative structure?faith ebbs and flows, flourishes and decays, develops and stagnates. Through an exploration of more than a dozen Catholic authors' novels and short stories, Brent Little argues that Catholic fiction encourages the reader to reflect upon their faith holistically, that is, the way faith informs one's affections, and how a person conceives and interacts with the world as embodied beings. Amidst the diverse stories of modern and contemporary fiction, a consistent pattern emerges: Catholic fiction portrays faith?at its most fundamental, often unconscious, level?as an act of the imagination. Faith is the way one imagines themselves, others, and creation. A person's primary faith conditions how they live in the world, regardless of the level of conscious reflection, and regardless of whether this is a "religious" faith. Acts of Faith and Imagination investigates the creative depth and vitality of the Catholic literary imagination by bringing late modern Catholic authors into dialogue with more contemporary ones. Readers will then consider well-known works, such as those by Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Muriel Spark in the fresh light of contemporary stories by Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, Uwem Akpan, and several others.

Author: Lorna G. Barrow
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743327145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World delves deep into the experience of Celtic communities and individuals in the late medieval period through to the modern age. Its thirteen essays range widely, from Scottish soldiers in France in the fifteenth century to Gaelic-speaking communities in rural New South Wales in the twentieth, and expatriate Irish dancers in the twenty-first. Connecting them are the recurring themes of memory and foresight: how have Celtic communities maintained connections to the past while keeping an eye on the future? Chapters explore language loss and preservation in Celtic countries and among Celtic migrant communities, and the influence of Celtic culture on writers such as Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. In Australia, how have Irish, Welsh and Scottish migrants engaged with the politics and culture of their home countries, and how has the idea of a Celtic identity changed over time? Drawing on anthropology, architecture, history, linguistics, literature and philosophy, Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World offers diverse, thought-provoking insights into Celtic culture and identity.

Author: Juliet Shields
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009003054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Introducing the neglected tradition of Scottish women's writing to readers who may already be familiar with English Victorian realism or the historical romances of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, this book corrects male-dominated histories of the Scottish novel by demonstrating how women appropriated the masculine genre of romance.

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453245030
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
“A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Author: Craig Cairns Craig
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628169
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Associationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough. Detailed analyses are offered of the ways in which a wide variety of major British writers, including Scott, Lady Morgan, Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf developed their literary techniques on the basis of associationist conceptions of the mind, and of how modern literary criticism - from Arthur Symons to Roland Barthes - is founded on associationist principles. Associationism and the Literary Imagination relocates the traditions of British writing since the eighteenth century within the neglected context of its native empirical philosophy, and reveals how many of the issues assumed to be products of 'postmodern' or 'deconstructive' theory have long been foregrounded and debated within the traditions of British empiricism. This is a work which provides a radical new perspective on the history of literature in Britain and Ireland and challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary theoretical debate about the

Author: Malcolm Bradbury
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
Bradbury argues that almost a century since the emergence of Modernism, it is now possible to see the entire period in perspective. It is clear that the first 50 years - from Henry James, Wilde and Stevenson, through James Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, to Huxley, Isherwood and Orwell - have been extensively discussed in print. The years since World War II, though, have not been examined in depth, yet have produced talents such as Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Beckett, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo.

Author: Richard Charles Kane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This innovative work delineates a new genre in contemporary British fiction--demonic didacticism. Through close textual analysis of eight novels, and consideration of essays by their authors, the study demonstrates how Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and John Fowles use demonic elements to make significant moral statements about human relationships.

Author: Sam Riviere
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646221338
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this "sublime" and "delightfully unhinged" metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums). A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night—and the remainder of the novel—to tell. Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with "nothingness," a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts—plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated. Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?

Author: Phōteinē Apostolou
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as The Comforters (1957), ^The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction. The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.