CATHOLIC BELIEFS IN MURIEL SPARK’S FICTION
Keywords:
Jettison, Ideology, Romanticism, SubsequentlyAbstract
It has become critical orthodoxy to view Spark solely within the contexts of Catholicism or postmodernism. Yet Spark’s writing is full of the influence of Romanticism. Because she uses it as a spring board from which to launch her more modern concerns, Romanticism is overlooked, simply a point of departure, subsequently jettisoned for the more fashionable ideologies of postmodernist and theoretical analysis. But this does scant justice to her use of Romantic topic and the Romantic imagination, and it fails to address how and why she uses the Romantic, and to what end. Critics like Alan Bold, Cairns Craig, Frank Kermode, Paddy Lyons and Alan Massie have explored the catholic issues in Muriel Spark’s fiction and found that Catholic concepts may be existing in her novels but it is surely with the sole of Romanticism.
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