The Hothouse by the East River
The Hothouse by the East River

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1453245073

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DIVDIVTouched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa’s relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of war/divDIV /divDIV/divDIVIn 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul convinces himself that Elsa’s shadow always points in the wrong direction. As Paul and Elsa’s involvement in World War II espionage begins to surface, the glitz and glamor of their lives is revealed to be nothing more than illusion./divDIV /divDIVThe Hothouse by the East River is a delirious satire of superficial urban life in the shadow of one of modern history’s great horrors./divDIV /divDIVThis 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./divDIV /divDIV/div/div

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death
Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death

Author: Craig Cairns Craig

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-02-20

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1474447236

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Contextualises Muriel Spark's writings in the tradition of Christian existentialism and its insistence on 'being towards death'This book proposes that Christian existentialism and, in particular, the work of Sren 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. Craig 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.Key FeaturesProvides detailed analyses of a substantial proportion of Spark's novelsExplains the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Sartre designed for readers without specialist philosophical knowledgeRe-reads major Spark works, such as The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Hothouse by the East River, Symposium, The Only ProblemAnalyses the ways in which Spark situates her plots within the major historical conflicts and social transformations of the twentieth century

(Un)like Subjects
(Un)like Subjects

Author: Gerardine Meaney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1136321454

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What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature? This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied the three most influential French feminists and three important contemporary British women novelists. Treating both fiction and theory as texts, she traces the connections between the theorists – Hélène Cixious, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – and the novelists – Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark. This reading of the work of these six major women writers explores new forms of women’s identity, subjectivity and narrative and demonstrates how theoretical and literary texts can illuminate each other to bridge the gap between theory and literary criticism.

Religion in the English Novel
Religion in the English Novel

Author: Michael Giffin

Publisher: Spaniel Books

Published: 2020-10-23

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1983887420

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Romanticism marked a dramatic turning point in philosophy and aesthetics. The shift from Classicism to Romanticism to Modernism and its Posts is paralleled in the shift from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Derrida. The central notions of the Enlightenment: nature, progress, rationalism, and rejection of the irrational are opposed by the central notions of the Counter-Enlightenment: relativism, vitalism, anti-rationalism, and sense of the organic. Then there is the idea of freedom at the heart of the West’s religious and secular vocabularies. The authors discussed in this study ask their readers to consider the question of freedom and constraints upon it. For some, freedom is found in Christianity; for others, Christianity is freedom’s enemy.

Cultural Revolution?
Cultural Revolution?

Author: Bart Moore-Gilbert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1134898975

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Are the cultural upheavals of the sixties just a media myth? The Summer of Love with its ambience of marijuana and sitar music, the glitterati of Swinging London, and student protesters battling with the police evoke a period of material prosperity, cultural innovation and youthful rebellion. But how significant were the radical aspirations and utopian ideals of the sixties? And what is the legacy of the social, political and cultural transformations which characterized the decade? In an interdisciplinary collection of specially commissioned essays, the contributors to Cultural Revolution uncover the complex economic and political contexts in which these changes took place. Covering a wide variety of art forms - drama, television, film, poetry, the novel, popular music, dance, cinema and the visual arts - they investigate how sixties' culture became politicized, and how its inherent contradictions still have repercussions for the arts today.

Going Beyond
Going Beyond

Author: Helga Schier

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-07-22

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3110910772

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Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark

Author: David Herman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-06

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0801895537

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"A substantial addition to Spark criticism, of which there has been surprisingly little published in recent years."--Aileen Christianson, University of Edinburgh --Book Jacket

Patrick White and God
Patrick White and God

Author: Michael Giffin

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1443893374

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The novels of Australia’s Nobel Laureate Patrick White (1912–1990) are a persistent commentary on Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death. As White knew the proclamation was not about God’s existence, but about classical views of God, it presented him with the impossible task of using language to describe what language cannot describe. This has always been one of the more misunderstood aspects of his literary vision. Because the announcement is often interpreted in antithetical ways, atheistic, theistic, secular, religious, humanistic and fatalistic, critics should gain a better understanding of what White was trying to achieve by comparing him with his post-war contemporaries from England, Scotland, and Canada: Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Robertson Davies. After, and because of, the war, these authors all commented on the consequences of God’s death. Along with White, they worked with a shared pattern of tropes to explore the light and dark aspects of western consciousness and the civilization it has produced. Where did the pattern come from? Was it metaphysical or metapsychological? These questions are complex as the pattern came from many sources, simultaneously and synergistically, but this book tackles these questions by describing that pattern.

Interpreting Literary Texts
Interpreting Literary Texts

Author: Michael Giffin

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-09-12

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 103641051X

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This book considers how textual interpretation has been influenced by post-Kantian philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the cultural transition from the correspondence theory of knowledge and truth to Nietzschean perspectivism, and the canonical transition from Classicism, to Romanticism, to Modernism, to Postmodernism. It discusses the principles of interpretation, the concept of reason (logos), and how the West’s model of mind evolved. The novels of Jane Austen introduce the concept of Classicism, including her debt to Aristotle’s thinking about Tragedy and Comedy in Poetics. The two trajectories of Romanticism are discussed, the philosophical trajectory through Berlin’s idea of Counter-Enlightenment—the immanent critique of metaphysics—and the aesthetic trajectory through Blake’s vision of what is possible if the doors of perception can be cleansed. The novels of Australia’s Patrick White introduce the concept of Modernism and his attempt to “imagine the real”. The novels of Margaret Atwood introduce the concept of Postmodernism, tracing her literary evolution from an author focused on female identity to one concerned with the future of humanity. The novels of Graham Greene and Muriel Spark are discussed as two different Catholic responses to Modernism. The novels of Marilynne Robinson and Douglas Wilson are discussed as two different Protestant responses to Calvinism.