Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel

Course Description

Summary

Muriel Spark, beginning in the late 1950s, produced a string of fiercely ambitious and savagely witty novels that harnessed the experimental power of the French nouveau roman and skewered the pieties of life in the postwar period of the 20th century. The problem of knowing; the relationship of art to life; the godlike power of authorship; the criminal scheming of flesh-driven seekers in a fallen world--Muriel Spark’s Catholicism (she converted after a religious experience while taking Benzedrine) lent her work its fierce detachment and the “devoutly starved” quality (James Wood) that makes her such a beguiling metafictionist, and a precursor to later disruptors of the British novel from Jeanette Winterson to Rachel Cusk.