Exile in Muriel Spark’s FictionFigures of Estrangement from Flâneurs to Refugees

Examines themes of exile and the figure of the stranger in Muriel Spark's opus

• Offers a timely and comprehensive re-evaluation of Spark's fiction, foregrounding a critical perspective – her sustained engagement with exile – that remains markedly underexplored within existing scholarship
• Provides a provocative reinterpretation of Spark's oeuvre in relation to the Western exilic canon, reassessing her position among post-war writers for whom displacement, dislocation, and exilic identity are central literary concerns
• Demonstrates that exile functions as a pervasive cultural and imaginative condition in Spark's work, shaped by the global upheavals of the Second World War, the ensuing ideological realignments of the post-war period, Cold-war era, and collapse of the USSR
• Shows how Spark's diverse figures of exile articulate a radical critique of the ideological structures – national, theological, and patriarchal – that seek to stabilise or regulate identity, thereby revealing a sustained and incisive political commentary that spans her entire career

This book demonstrates that exile functions as a vital conceptual thread running through Spark's oeuvre. It advances the case for recognising her as a leading exilic writer of the post-war era, one whose work reshapes critical understandings of belonging, estrangement and exilic identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Providing a provocative reinterpretation of Spark's fiction in relation to the Western exilic canon, the book shows that exile functions as a pervasive cultural and imaginative condition in Spark's work, shaped by the global upheavals of the Second World War, the ensuing ideological realignments of the post-war period, Cold-war era, and collapse of the USSR.