‘Gleaming with history-in-darkness’: an archival exploration of Muriel Spark’s fiction from poetics to publishing

Harvie, Steven (2024) ‘Gleaming with history-in-darkness’: an archival exploration of Muriel Spark’s fiction from poetics to publishing. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The Muriel Spark archive, split across several institutions, has prompted new and insightful criticism on Spark and her work, but no one has yet used the archive to construct a portrait of Spark’s craft as a novelist, with detailed analyses of how she wrote, including the development of her novelistic aesthetic from her beginnings as a poet, the composition process through which her narrative and prose style emerges, or the paratextual negotiations that have informed and framed the publication and reception of her novels. Using archival material from the National Library of Scotland and the Macmillan Archive, and borrowing from methodologies of manuscript analysis such as genetic criticism, I paint some brushstrokes towards this portrait, or better yet a map, of Spark’s novel writing insomuch as ‘novel writing’ refers to a more expansive conception of Spark’s creative practice that encompasses poetry and poetics, theories of the novel, the mechanics of composition, and the necessary branding processes of commercial fiction publishing.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Supervisor's Name: Stoddart, Professor Helen, Carruthers, Professor Gerard and McIlroy, Colin
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84576
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Sep 2024 07:10
• Last Modified: 19 Sep 2024 07:12
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84576
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84576