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Home / Publications / Books / Occasional Papers / The Crooked Dividend

The Crooked Dividend

THE CROOKED DIVIDEND:
Essays on Muriel Spark

Occasional Papers series No. 24
Edited by Gerard Carruthers and Helen Stoddart

Published in: Paperback
By: Scottish Literature International, 2022
Price: £19.95 / €24.95 / $27.95
ISBN: 9781908980335

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This volume of fourteen essays offers fresh insight into the life and work of Muriel Spark (1918–2006), one of Scotland’s most internationally celebrated writers. Known for her cultural cosmopolitanism and sharp wit, Spark was prolific as a novelist, poet, short story writer, dramatist, and literary critic. The Crooked Dividend provides a thorough overview of Spark’s multifaceted work and examines the cultural, literary, and personal frameworks that shaped her writing. These essays contextualise Spark within post-war British culture, analyse the influence of longstanding Scottish literary traditions on her work, and explore the full range of her literary output through topics such as gender, religion, and politics. In a comprehensive examination of her publications, archive material, and colourful career, this volume celebrates and reaffirms Spark’s international legacy.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Critical Concerns for Muriel Spark (Gerard Carruthers)

I: SPARK, BIOGRAPHY, AND FEMALE EXPERIENCE

1. ‘I knew what was what’: Correspondence and the Meta-Archival in the Muriel Spark Archive (Colin McIlroy)
2. Muriel Spark’s Waywardness (Carole Jones)
3. Spark’s Spinsters: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in the Novels of Muriel Spark (Susannah Thompson)
4. Between Desire and Control: The Fashioned Image in Muriel Spark’s Life and Fiction (Monica Germanà)
5. ‘Unfortunately you have left out all the love poems’: Spark in Love (Willy Maley and Dini Power)

II: WRITING MATERIALS

6. Muriel Spark and J. M. Barrie (Cairns Craig)
7. All the Abbess’s Nuns: Muriel Spark and the Idioms of Watergate (Colin Kidd)
8. ‘Making patterns with facts’: Unmaking History in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Catriona M. M. Macdonald)
9. Muriel Spark and the ‘Hired Grammarians’ (Helen Stoddart)
10. Already and Not Yet Written: Unfinished Acts of Writing in the Novels of Muriel Spark (Mark Currie)
11. Muriel Spark’s Windows and the Architecture of Surveillance (Amy Woodbury Tease)
12. Art and Industry Must Walk Hand in Hand: Muriel Spark and Twentieth-Century Design Ideology (Fiona Jardine)
13. The Publishing Scene in A Far Cry from Kensington (Ernest Schonfield)
14. Dramatic Contexts and Metatheatricality in Muriel Spark’s Writing for Performance (Ian Brown)

Notes on Contributors
Index

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Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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