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Book Cover
E-book
Author Craig, Cairns, author

Title Muriel Spark, existentialism and the art of death / Cairns Craig
Published Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2019]
©2019

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 224 pages)
Contents Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Living next door to death -- Resisting realism -- Kierkegaard: the limits of the aesthetic -- Negating Sartre -- Repetition -- The geopolitics of the personal -- The art of death -- Index
Summary Proposes that Christian existentialism and, in particular, the work of Søren Kierkegaard, helped shape Spark's religious commitments and her artistic innovations. Because of the prominence, after the Second World War, of the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, it is often forgotten that existentialism was originally a Christian philosophy, shaped by followers of Kierkegaard such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. The author traces in Spark's writings both the influence of Kierkegaard and of Spark's resistance to Sartre's co-option of existentialism to an atheistic agenda. Kierkegaard's analysis of the nature of the "aesthetic" as a false mode of existence that has to be transcended by the ethical and then by the religious provides a fundamental structure for Spark's satirical analyses of the failings of the modern world
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Spark, Muriel -- Criticism and interpretation
Spark, Muriel -- Themes, motives
Spark, Muriel -- Religion
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855 -- Influence
SUBJECT Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855 fast
Spark, Muriel fast
Subject Christianity and existentialism in literature.
Christianity and existentialism.
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Christianity and existentialism
Christianity and existentialism in literature
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Religion
Themes, motives
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781474447225
1474447228