Search Results

This chapter discusses Richard Huelsenbeck and his pre-Dada writings, showing that his extensive knowledge of how his country was politically and practically directed partly determined his literary agenda. It reveals the notion of the other politician and how this politician was gendered in Huelsenbeck's last Dada text. The chapter shows that Huelsenbeck provided an alternative to the practical organisation of democracy through his experimental literature.

This chapter considers the dangers of underestimating the value of short fiction to Woolf's literary career. Gasston argues against Woolf's short fiction being viewed as an infrequently practiced hobby rather than serious literary output.

This introductory chapter provides a comprehensive account of Spark’s critical reception, spanning the 1960s to the present day. Established critical views, it argues, have collectively developed a ‘myth’ of Spark as an author who delights in playing the role of malevolent master-puppeteer, flaunting her powers of omniscience before the reader. This tendency to liken Spark’s authorial power to that wielded punitively by the Old Testament God does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of her writing, and blunts its political anger and subversive edge. Instead, this rigid, prescriptive theologically-informed reading of Spark has postponed or even precluded more rigorous analysis of the significance of the social and historical contexts and concerns of her fiction, explorations of the relevance of her writing to diverse strands of literary and psychoanalytic theory, as well as considerations of how her literary innovations have facilitated instances of gendered social critique. Spark’s narrative perspectives – which are multifarious rather than uniform, altering drastically from one text to the next – are instead concerned intensely with reflecting and subverting the dynamics of power, knowledge and control operating within the worlds in which they are set, rather than conveying godlike omniscience.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is her most “experimental” novel. The Waves is made up of two sorts of discourse juxtaposed: the ten “interludes” in the past tense distributed through the novel describing waves breaking on the shore at various times of the day and at various seasons, and the present tense “soliloquies” (her words) of the six characters at various times in their lives. Just what set of interpretative hypotheses will best and most economically account for the strange stylistic features of The Waves? The best answer is that The Waves presupposes a vast impersonal memory bank that stores everything that has ever happened, every thought or feeling of every person, but turned into appropriate language, complete with figures of speech for sensations and feelings that cannot be said literally. Passages in Woolf’s Dairy and in her “A Sketch of the Past” (from Moments of Being) confirm this hypothesis.

This chapter examines how the self-reflexive techniques employed in her writing work to facilitate instances of gendered social critique, while also interrogating the wider functioning of power and personal identity in the increasingly mediatised postmodern consumer culture in which they were written. The chapter focuses predominantly on three of Spark’s most formally and thematically experimental works: 1962’s seldom-discussed stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, 1968’s slight and sparsely detailed The Public Image, and the elaborately metafictional satire of celebrity and press sensationalism, Not to Disturb, published in 1971. Also discussed here is ‘A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs’ (c.1960), an unpublished short story that encountered in the author’s archive in the McFarlin Library in Tulsa. In each case, Spark’s literary innovations are read alongside her longstanding preoccupation with the tensions that exist between private selves and public performances – with bodies nearly inscribed within oppressive cultural narratives (and those deemed to be deviant for daring to exist outside of them), and with the sinister, violent negation of female subjectivity.

Concentrating on the development of her fiction during the decade spanning 1960 to 1970, this chapter traces the evolving relationship between Spark’s novels and the style and ethos of the nouveau roman. It focuses in particular on Spark’s inventive appropriation of what she termed ‘the drama of exact observation,’ as derived from the meticulous, externalised narration characteristic of the work of one of the key practitioners of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Although critical analysis of Spark’s relationship with the anti-novel has largely been restricted to a small selection of overtly experimental novels written by the author during the early 1970s, this chapter demonstrates that the nouveau roman also served as a crucial influence on earlier works including 1960’s subversive social satire, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, as well the uncharacteristically expansive sociopolitical novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, published in 1965. Both texts, the chapter argues, reveal Spark actively interrogating the alternatively humorous and horrifying possibilities of the nouveau roman as a mode of writing. The chapter culminates with a discussion of The Driver’s Seat as Spark’s Spark’s most direct – and self-reflexive – encounter with the anti-novel.

This chapter examines the treatment of spectrality in Spark’s debut novel, The Comforters, as well as in a selection of early (and otherwise realistic) short stories. It discuss some of Spark’s earliest attempts to realise – to quote from her preceding study of John Masefield – ‘how sharp and lucid fantasy can be when it is deliberately intagliated on the surface of realism.’ The first half of the chapter concerns what is classified as the textual haunting, whereby the supernatural encounter is treated as an instance of metalepsis – a violation, that is, of the text’s diegetic boundaries, which is in some ways analogous to the ghost’s traversal of ontological ones. The chapter’s second section examines the significance of the ghost story as a vital means of critiquing forms of patriarchal power, along with conventional gender roles and their attendant expectations.

This chapter extends the preceding chapter’s discussion of The Driver’s Seat to offer a thorough reassessment of its largely one-sided critical reception, as well as its nuanced approach to the inextricable relationship between gender, narrative perspective and epistemological power. It argues that the novel – which has been read predominantly as Spark’s most starkly drawn parable of human fallibility versus divine omniscience – is concerned instead with that which escapes and thus destabilises the exacting, investigative and emphatically male gaze of its narrator. Through a critical framework which combines critical commentary on the nouveau roman, previously unexamined archival material, studies of metaphysical detective fiction, and theory related to narrative point of view, the chapter shifts focus from existing readings of the protagonist, Lise, as the hopeless object of a godlike narrative viewpoint, and considers her instead as a captivating figure who, even after death, confronts and commands the epistemologically limited perspective of her hopelessly fascinated narrator-voyeur. Spark’s description of The Driver’s Seat as ‘a study, in a way, of self-destruction’ can thus be seen to relate not only to Lise’s determined drive to death, but to the subversive unravelling of the narrating ‘self,’ tormented and undone by the novel’s perennially unknowable subject.

This concluding chapter presents a detailed examination of Spark’s most outlandish work of metafiction, The Hothouse by the East River, as a means of uniting the various, interrelated strands of literary experimentation, satire, subversion and social critique discussed over the course of the preceding chapters. Like The Driver’s Seat almost immediately before it, Hothouse stages the operation and gradual deconstruction of a masculine ideal of all-knowing omnipotence; its protagonist, Paul, spirals into impotent obsession when he finds himself unable to decipher the impenetrable mystery concocted by his ghostly wife, Elsa. Before this point, Paul has enjoyed exploiting the kind of manipulative authority exhibited by the likes of The Public Image’s Frederick Christopher, Not to Disturb’s Baron Klopstock, The Ballad of Peckham Rye’s Mr Druce, and Doctors of Philosophy’s Charlie Delfont. Akin to the female characters in those texts (Annabel Christopher, Baroness Klopstock, Merle Coverdale and Leonora Chase, most notably), Elsa has come to languish within a narrow, preconstructed role, before seizing her opportunity, as Leonora and Annabel do, to abandon it entirely. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Spark’s best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, before reflecting critically on the aims and achievements of the present study.