Project Title: ‘Gleaming with history-in-darkness’: An Archival Exploration of Muriel Spark’s Fiction from Poetics to Publishing
Link to Institutional Repository of thesis: Steven Harvie
What was your research about?
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.
CONNECT WITH STEVEN
Email: Steven Harvie
Bluesky: @deep-tread