Download or read book Metafictional Aspects in Novels by Muriel Spark written by Gesa Giesing and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-08-30 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Leipzig (Institute for Anglistics), language: English, abstract: ANYTHING WRITTEN IN ENGLISH IS A LIE Anything written in English is a lie. This is by no means a new idea, with many people having given thought and expression to it (recently and rather extensively so, for instance, Jeanette Winterson). One way to handle this sentence is to relate it to the idea that something written can never be reality. That then, though, some things written (or only fictional texts?; or even fictional texts?; or anything produced?) might have a reality of their own, and that finally these realities might be part of another, larger and encompassing reality – they might. There need not be such a larger idea beyond things. All novelists have been faced with the question of how to deal with this multilayered reality, novels that deal with it explicitly being called metafictional novels. Metafictional literature has come up with innumerable ways of handling and playing with the notion of what is being real and what fictitious. Anything written in English is a lie. This sentence is also putting into other words the famous paradox of the Cretan stating that all Cretans are liars. For with both, as with many other paradoxes, the paradox is a result of the statement′s self-reference. Since the statement is written in English, it denies its own truth, which it actually does not if it is a lie – it would stop being a lie then, though. Any attempt to solve the paradox will end in moving in circles. The only way not to go insane when trying to find a solution is to accept that the sentence is made up and that it cannot be true in terms of our familiar logic. Once we view it as artificial, as something that has been made up to be not solvable (which need not be the case), we adopt another perspective and for instance allow ourselves to be entertained by contemplating paradoxes. Confronted with any paradoxical or otherwise inexplicable situation human beings still feel an urge to ascribe explanations and reasons to it and often turn to religion, commonplace theories or superstition to find them. Religions explain how the Earth came into existence. If we drop a cup or spill hot milk, it happened because our boss was being a strain. If we got an unjustified salary rise, the stars would have favoured us. A religious woman might regard it as God’s punishment when she falls in love with her husband’s lover. Seldom are we at a loss for an explanation which we may well believe in but which cannot be proved to be causative...
Download or read book Loitering with Intent written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Comforters written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Metafiction written by Patricia Waugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Not to Disturb A Novel written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb. A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron’s lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary’s friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend’s services are needed for an impromptu wedding—and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.
Download or read book Metafiction written by Patricia Waugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Muriel Spark written by David Herman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A substantial addition to Spark criticism, of which there has been surprisingly little published in recent years."--Aileen Christianson, University of Edinburgh --Book Jacket
Download or read book The Abbess of Crewe written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.
Download or read book Lie With Me written by Philippe Besson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson—“the French Brokeback Mountain” (Elle)—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside. Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.
Download or read book The Meaning of Metafiction written by Inger Christensen and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 20th century literature, a kind of fiction has come much to the fore where the narrator discusses his own craft and frequently addresses the reader. However, Laurence Sterneʼs Tristram Shandy may serve as a striking example of the fact that metafiction is no modern phenomenon. Metafiction has been criticized for solipsism and regarded as a final proof of ʼthe novel no longer novelʼ. Discussing works of three contemporary novelists, Nobokov, Barth and Beckett, and Sterneʼs eighteenth century novel, the author argues that with their tricks, parodies and humour (humor) the metafictionists are concerned with a central human problem: communication. Should literature entertain, come up with ideas about the meaning of existence or give the reader a purely aesthetic experience? The four novelists examined in this study give different and rather exciting answers to these questions and to the problem of bringing their intentions across to the reader. Book cover.
Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.
Download or read book Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women s Writing written by A. Heilmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers' reconfigurations of history.
Download or read book Territorial Rights written by Muriel Spark and published by Coward McCann. This book was released on 1979 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for a staid academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of lust, lies, blackmail, cocktail parties, and regicide. As he chases Lina, his heart's desire, the city itself provides a priceless education in love, art, and beauty. Witty yet elegant, Territorial Rights is a celebration of human imperfection and complexity, with as many shifting identities, wardrobe changes, and sumptuous settings as a comic opera.
Download or read book The Finishing School written by Muriel Spark and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Muriel Spark, the grande dame of literary satire, comes this swift, deliciously witty tale of writerly ambition that recalls her beloved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.College Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school located, for now, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into Rowland’s creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a red-haired literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots, has already excited the interest of publishers. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse fraught with jealousy and attraction, both literary and sexual.
Download or read book The Hour of the Star written by Clarice Lispector and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1992 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark written by Michael Gardiner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-06 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
