Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark

Michael Gardiner

iyl 2010 · Edinburgh University Press

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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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Michael Gardiner is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. As well as creative fiction and comparative cultural history and world literature, his books include The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (EUP, 2004), Modern Scottish Culture (2005), and From Trocchi to Trainspotting; Scottish Literary Theory Since 1960 (2006). Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow. He writes on both Renaissance and Scottish literature, most recently Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2002), Muriel Spark for Starters (2009). Edited collections include, with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (2004) and, with Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Politics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2006).