Download or read book Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark s Fiction written by Phōteinē Apostolou and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as The Comforters (1957), ^The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction. The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.
Download or read book Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark s Fiction written by Phōteinē Apostolou and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as The Comforters (1957), ^The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction. The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.
Download or read book A Companion to British Literature Volume 4 written by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to British Literature, Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837 - 2000
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 The Mandelbaum Gate written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVFor Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discovery/divDIV /divDIV/divDIVBarbara Vaughn is a scholarly woman whose fascination with religion stems partly from a conversion to Catholicism, and partly from her own half-Jewish background. When her boyfriend joins an archaeological excursion to search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Vaughn takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. But this is 1960, and with the nation of Israel still in its infancy, the British Empire in retreat from the region, and the Eichmann trials in full swing, Vaughn uncovers much deeper mysteries than those found at tourist sites. /divDIV /divDIVBoth an espionage thriller and a journey of faith, The Mandelbaum Gate won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize upon its publication, and is one of Spark’s most compelling novels./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
Download or read book The Hispanic Connection written by Zenia S. DaSilva and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DaSilva draws together key essays dealing with the span of Spanish and Latin American arts, ranging from literature, music, film, and ballet to painting. Scholars and researchers involved with the scope of Spanish and Spanish American arts will find this collection of particular value. The selections center on basic themes including the icons of Spain, the use of characters from classic Spanish literature in performing and visual arts, romantic and modern Spanish writers and their influences, and the fusion of Mexican and Spanish culture. The selections center on ten basic themes: The early icons of Spain; the uses of Don Quixote from operas to painting; Don Juan is given a similar treatment, with theater, film, and ballet in addition to literature and opera; an examination of areas of fusion of Spanish and Mexican culture; Spanish Romantics in opera and ballet; modern writers whose work appears in musical transcription; modern writers whose novels appear in film; an examination of works that parody earlier pieces; a survey of the interrelationship between painting and its literary sources; and a look at the variegated artistic peregrinations of such contemporaries as Marquez, Puig, Skarmeta, and others. Scholars and researchers involved with the scope of Spanish and Spanish American arts will find this collection of particular value.
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 Theorising Muriel Spark written by M. McQuillan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing Muriel Spark is the first serious attempt to engage the writing of Muriel Spark in a sustained theoretical reading. It has a particular emphasis on gender, psychoanalysis, postcolonial and deconstructive reading strategies. Drawing together a range of significant names in the field of contemporary literature and critical theory (including Judith Roof, Susan Sellers, Bryan Cheyette, Patricia Duncker, Nicholas Royle, Willy Maley, Julian Wolfreys, and Helene Cixous) this collection of essays deals with the full range of Spark's literary output. It concludes with a new interview with Muriel Spark.
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 British National Bibliography written by Arthur James Wells and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 1600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hothouse by the East River written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Download or read book Directory written by Modern Language Association of America and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Restless written by William Boyd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
Download or read book Appointment in Samarra written by John O'Hara and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My Losing Season written by Pat Conroy and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2003-08-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball—and life itself—by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for becoming his own man. With all the drama and incandescence of his bestselling fiction, Conroy re-creates his pivotal senior year as captain of the Citadel Bulldogs. He chronicles the highs and lows of that fateful 1966–67 season, his tough disciplinarian coach, the joys of winning, and the hard-won lessons of losing. Most of all, he recounts how a group of boys came together as a team, playing a sport that would become a metaphor for a man whose spirit could never be defeated. Praise for My Losing Season “A superb accomplishment, maybe the finest book Pat Conroy has written.”—The Washington Post Book World “A wonderfully rich memoir that you don’t have to be a sports fan to love.”—Houston Chronicle “A memoir with all the Conroy trademarks . . . Here’s ample proof that losers always tell the best stories.”—Newsweek “In My Losing Season, Conroy opens his arms wide to embrace his difficult past and almost everyone in it.”—New York Daily News “Haunting, bittersweet and as compelling as his bestselling fiction.”—Boston Herald
Download or read book The Buried Giant written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory. In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven't seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share. By turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving, The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.
