Exile in Muriel Spark’s Fiction - Figures of Estrangement from Flaneurs to Refugees

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.