The social-scientific imagination: Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye

This article concentrates on Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and its indirect and mediated representation of the welfare state in the form of a ‘social-scientific imagination’, manifested in both cultural ideology and literary form. The ‘social-scientific imagination’ describes the textual engagement of Spark’s novel with the language and technique of newly professionalised social-scientific disciplines, in particular with new sociological studies of working life. In its representation of a shift in official modes of organising the social body, Spark's novel prefigures the ideological undermining of the welfare state through the invocation of individual responsibility and anti-bureaucratization.