[PDF] Muriel Spark Time In Her Fiction eBook

Author : Linette Arthurton Bruno
Publisher : Editions Publibook
Page : 108 pages
File Size : 39,54 MB
Release : 2012-08-22
Category :
ISBN : 2748390008

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Muriel Spark seems to have seen the world as a stage where all the men and women are merely players having their "moments" on the stage of life. "One's prime is the moment one was born for" she has been known to say, and it is those moments, mere spots in time, that she describes in her fiction. Old people become babes again. School-boys (or girls) grow into their prime. That is the cycle of life that can be traced throughout her work, a pattern of birth, growth, and decay that is akin to the seasons. Through the analysis of these five finely chosen novels – Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate and The Driver’s Seat – Linette Arthurton Bruno attempts to show how Muriel Spark adapts her time-structure to her theme. A great piece of work that underlines the skills of a woman considered as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 31,22 MB
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811219755

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Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 11,43 MB
Release : 2012-03-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1453245030

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“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 : Martin Stannard
Publisher : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 38,15 MB
Release : 2009-08-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0297857789

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The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.

Author : Linette Arthurton Bruno
Publisher : CreateSpace
Page : 108 pages
File Size : 32,15 MB
Release : 2013-03-23
Category : Time in literature
ISBN : 9781482788297

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Muriel Spark's preoccupation with man's inability to control his own destiny seems to be accompanied by a mischievous curiosity concerning the supernatural and a wish to delve into its secrets. Miss Brodie exerts a strange power over her pupils. There are prophetic utterances in "The Girls of Slender Means" which announce the coming of tragedy. In "The Driver's Seat" we find Lise's uncanny sixth sense and Mrs, Fiedke's prediction. In "Memento Mori" there is the strange voice on the telephone which warns the aged to remember they must die.Muriel Spark's real concern, however, is a realistic representation of life in her fiction. The better to convey the idea of life as a series of moments, Spark adapts the structure in her novels to embody moments representing the uncertainties of life. Sometimes Time follows an uninterrupted flow and nothing happens to alter its course. At other times, obstacles spring up and bring about a change in direction. Some trivial object may produce an association which sends a character's memory racing back to the past.A sympathetic obedience to the cycle of life and that of the seasons can also be traced throughout the five novels discussed, which treat respectively youth, man in his prime, death and decay which have their parallel in the seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Miss Brodie sits under the big elm in the school grounds with her girls (in the Spring of their lives) while Autumn leaves fall. The inhabitants of the Maud Long Ward are in the 'winter' of their lives. The cycles of life and of the seasons form part of the pattern which Muriel Spark imposes on her work to give it more coherence.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 10,24 MB
Release : 1998-04-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811221040

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"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 13,40 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811214940

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Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions' original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 29,60 MB
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811222411

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Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher :
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 32,78 MB
Release : 1982
Category : Fiction in English, 1945- - Texts
ISBN : 9780140021578

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January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it." In Robinson, Muriel Spark's wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, and -- perhaps -- murder.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 46,62 MB
Release : 2012-03-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 145324509X

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DIVDIV“Sleek and suggestive . . . [Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you’ve accepted a world gone utterly awry.” —Kirkus Reviews /divDIV/divDIVBritish film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not—and with no idea who to trust. Soon his wife, children, and friends are all undergoing crises of their own, from the breakup of a marriage to the loss of a job. As Richard fights to regain his health and stay centered amid the swirling chaos of his personal life, he must also wrest control of his film—his most prized pursuit—from those who seek to take it away./divDIV /divDIVWitty andengrossing, Reality and Dreams is a whiplash ride through the highs and lows of the creative process./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