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Katherine Ferrier argues against the common understanding of Susan Ferrier as a lone observer and outsider, contending instead that her art is in fact propelled by collaboration and sociability. Mao Guihua and Zheng Ronghua take an eco-critical approach to the works of Robert Burns, offering a close analysis of animal subjectivity in key Burns poems. Joanna Martin analyses the representation of human emotion via language in The Buik of King Alexander The Conquerour.

Muriel Spark was obsessed with the Brontë sisters, their house, their literary careers and their afterlives. Although critics have commented on the relationship between Spark's critical and biographical studies of the Brontës and her own emerging writing practice, few have compared them in depth. This essay classifies Spark, the Brontës, and their female characters as mythmakers, governesses, and tigresses, exploring female authorship and autonomy in the nineteenth and twentieth century and beyond. Spark engages with and imitates the Brontës' ways of establishing their literary career and fame, but she assumes a critical distance from the Brontës' solipsism and their self-mythologising process. Spark also moves beyond the Brontës' scope and discusses women's claims for their own agency in an increasingly globalised and mediatised consumerist society.

Age is a cultural entity like race, class, and gender that must be explored deeply. The increase in the aged population all over the world by 2050 will promote serious inquiry in the field of gerontology. The issues of the aged, like ageism, old age abuse, and negative age stereotypes, need age appropriateness, the individual: physical and psychological and the social, political, and economic aspects of ageing need to be analysed to understand the phenomenon comprehensively. This study must be promoted in the postmodern, industrial, and globalised world. The central focus gerontologists and gerontological theories insist on is successful, positive, and happy ageing. Gerontological ideas review the place of older people in society, reinvent positive images of ageing, and stand for perpetuating the images. Many gerontological inquiries conclude that an individual's ageing experience is influenced by society's standards and attitude towards older people. Literature is taken as a resource to comprehend the individual experience of ageing. Gerontologists suggest attaching some goals during the later stage to gain a positive outlook on the last stage of life. This will promote successful ageing. The paper tries to explain the scope of ageing studies in the literature, identifying literary gerontology as a promising field in health sciences that will delve deep into age and ageing, and satisfy the ideals mentioned earlier.

Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

My paper traces the Hungarian reception history of Muriel Spark from the 1960s, when the work first appeared in Hungarian, to the present. First, I outline the appreciation and interpretation of her works through a close reading of reviews and articles published in the 1960s and 1970s, when her fiction attracted immediate and mostly perceptive attention in socialist Hungary, apart from a few opinionated reviews. Second, I lay out the reasons why interest in her work has waned since the mid19 8 os. Finally, I argue that despite a passing academic interest in the early 2.000s, Spark has not to date regained the reputation she enjoyed in the 1960s, when her novels appeared in Hungarian with little or no delay, thanks largely to the assiduous efforts of a handful of translators devoted to her fiction. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) was published in Hungarian more than half a century late in a translation of appalling quality. I will conclude that by the time of the free-market transformation of the socialist book industry, the novelty of Sparks fiction had faded, and she had not yet achieved the status of a contemporary classic. While academics expanded on the insightful criticism she received in socialist Hungary, literary magazines and cataloguing websites merely echo the reductive opinions she received in the 1960s, which explains her lack of proper recognition in the contemporary Hungarian context.

This essay concentrates on Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and its indirect and mediated representation of the welfare state in the form of a social-scientific imagination, manifested in both its content and form. The social-scientific imagination describes the novel's engagement with the language and technique of social-scientific disciplines that were newly professionalized in the mid-twentieth century, particularly new sociological studies of working life. In representing a shift in official modes of organizing the social body, Spark's novel prefigures the ideological and actual undermining of the welfare state through the invocation of individual responsibility, flexibility, and antibureaucratization.

First published in 1961, Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of the most well-known works of 20th-century British literature, and the book’s portrayal of the eponymous Edinburgh schoolmistress and her select clique of pupils during the turbulent 1930s now forms part of contemporary popular culture. After presenting a quick panorama of the author and the work, this article adopts a bipartite approach to describe the role of food at different junctures in the narrative. Initially, it focuses on the types of foods presented and the occasions where they are served (for example, as high teas), thereby seeking to outline whether any wider literary symbolism can be detected. Subsequently, the article examines the unusual role of food and foodstuffs in Miss Brodie’s romantic relationship with Mr Lowther, the school’s music teacher, a liaison which is ostensibly centred around her focus on him consuming large quantities of food in order to gain weight. These two sets of food-related observations are then interpreted, analysed, and summarised before further suggestions for additional research on the topic are outlined.

In Roxana, for example, we hear from a vulnerable female protagonist who finesses her way into financial independence and whose avoidance of several marriage proposals sets her apart, perhaps admirably, from a reliance on social convention to support herself. When, at the novel's end, her daughter Susan finds her out and threatens to play havoc with the luxurious life she has cultivated for herself, her maid Amy's desire to murder her and Roxana's indifference to her dying of natural causes surely give the reader pause: however unsavory her daughter Susan's motives for tracking her down may be, Roxana's self-interest, extended in Amy, dominates her feelings and actions, even if she repents them in the end. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity. (quoted in Shinagel 1994, 323) My own question as Defoe's reader, and the main question that came to inform my teaching of this book, is how aware of this characterization is Crusoe's creator? When, near the novel's end, Friday teases the bear at length for his onlookers' amusement, only to shoot the bear dead, he could well be mocking Crusoe's condescending, colonialist behavior toward Friday-mocking in both the sense of imitating and, from Defoe's standpoint, ridiculing.

One reason why the concept of the quotidian has proved elusive to critics of literature and the visual arts is that the commonplace in art and literature so often refuses to remain untransfigured, not least because of its power to confront us with the material detritus with which we surround ourselves and which we will eventually join. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary artists share a preoccupation with finding both mortality and transcendence in what John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester called “the lumber of the world.” In this paper, I shall consider how an early Damien Hirst mini-installation, consisting of a glass tumbler of water and a ping-pong ball, takes its only partly mocking place in a still life tradition going back to Roman xenia and seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, and to a related literary tradition typified by Thomas Hardy’s Under the Waterfall and James Joyce’s great prose aria to water all its forms in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.

Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a radical metafictional experiment, suggesting the inexorable connections between contingency and a predetermined plot which are so common to many Sparkian novels. Following Marina MacKay’s perception that Spark’s experimental narrative operates “in the conceptual space where the more abstract preoccupations of Roman Catholic theology overlap with the metafictional and fabulist concerns of postmodernism” (2008: 506), this essay will discuss how the notion of predestination reverberates in The Driver’s Seat, not only as a remnant of Spark’s Presbyterian education but also as a postmodern re-visitation of classical tragedy in a metafictional key. Spark’s preference for predetermined plots may echo a long philosophical and theological discussion spanning many centuries about free will and predestination, particularly intense in the times of the Protestant Reformation, but it also reflects the sense of predestination as a necessary ingredient of classical tragedy. In The Driver’s Seat Spark deliberately brought to the fore some conventions of Aristotelian tragedy, although she approached them through an experimental subversion ultimately resorting to comedy and ridicule, on Spark’s own admission her weapons for the only possible art form. Our contention is that the metafictional implications of The Driver’s Seat’s prolepses undermine a Calvinist-like certainty concerning predestined salvation or damnation. By using a partial narrator only capable of producing limited accounts, Spark may be playing with an experimental and essentially postmodern interpretive openness which is in tune with the ultimate uncertainty about each individual’s eternal salvation that is commonly accepted in Catholic thought.