(Forthcoming Monograph) Exile in Muriel Spark's Fiction

Muriel Spark’s provocative claim to being a “constitutional exile” in her 1962 essay ‘What Images Return’ has remained a touchstone in discussions of her contested Scottish identity. Whilst this declaration has generated substantial critical debate over the decades, the broader and more pervasive presence of exile throughout her work has received surprisingly limited attention. Across her short fiction, novels, radio dramas, essays, interviews, and autobiography, exile emerges not as a peripheral motif but as a persistent imaginative force. This monograph argues that exile functions as a vital conceptual thread running through Spark’s oeuvre and 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.