Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from ...its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carré's bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from James Bond to John Banville's contemporary narratives, Allan Hepburn sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s.
Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre,Intrigueemphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. Hepburn begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didion'sDemocracyand John Barth'sSabbatical.
Addressing current debates in museum studies, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism,Enchanted Objectsdevelops an extensive theory of how contemporary literature engages with and ...relates to aesthetic objects.
Espionage depends on the gathering, sifting, reporting, and selling of information. In Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, information about a German plot to invade Britain has implications ...for statehood and military strategy. This novel responds to the changing culture of information and reconnaissance captured by Robert Baden-Powell's Reconnaissance and Scouting, David Henderson's The Art of Reconnaissance, and military manuals that give advice on collecting information about enemy positions and armaments. Drawing on the resources of reconnaissance and espionage, Childers urges the British government to develop a North Sea defence policy while preparing citizens to defend themselves against invasion.
Why do some novels have a fast pace and others slow? Pace in narrative gauges the movement of a story in a specific direction with respect to time. Dialogue, descriptive summaries, chapter breaks, ...and other formal elements speed up or slow down the perceived tempo of a narrative. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , John le Carré creates pace by exploiting the discrepancies between fabula and syuzhet . By his own admission, he prefers to begin a story as late as possible to induce pressure between the content of a story and the manner of its telling, a pressure that sets and regulates narrative pace.
John Banville identifies style as an attribute of world literature. As a novelist, he admires authors who make wit, word play, linguistic theatricality and virtuosity literary ends in themselves. In ...reviews and articles, he praises Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and other writers for their highly polished prose styles. In turn, critics single out Banville's own finely tuned style as the defining trait of his novels. Invoking world literature theory, this essay works towards a definition of literary style and more particularly Irish style, such as Banville perceives it. As an aspect of world literature, certain novels display "extensibility," which is to say that they borrow from and build upon prior novels, not just by repurposing characters, but also by adopting premises, situations, vocabularies, and style. Banville creates extensions of Nabokov's Lolita in The Untouchable, James's The Portrait of a Lady in Mrs Osmond, and Chandler's detective novels in The Black-Eyed Blonde, published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Through such extensions, Banville elaborates a world style that enhances literary prestige and contributes to the system of world literature.
Why do some novels have a fast pace and others slow ? Pace in narrative gauges the movement of a story in a specific direction with respect to time. Dialogue, descriptive summaries, chapter breaks, ...and other formal elements speed up or slow down the perceived tempo of a narrative. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carre creates pace by exploiting the discrepancies between fabula and syuzhet. By his own admission, he prefers to begin a story as late as possible to induce pressure between the content of a story and the manner of its telling, a pressure that sets and regulates narrative pace.
In Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness (1950), forgiveness affords possibilities to redeem personal and national guilt. Can humankind be forgiven for atrocities perpetrated during the Second Word ...War, and if so, by whom? Whereas forgiveness can undo the predicament of irreversibility by bringing about reconciliation and an improved future for individuals and communities, those outcomes never come to pass in this novel. Refusal to acknowledge guilt thwarts the likelihood that the future of Europe will differ from the past. Critics usually dismiss Macaulay's religious thinking as irrelevant, but she freely adapts Christian ideas about atonement and forgiveness to this narrative about guilt. This essay draws upon a wide range of Macaulay's fictional and critical works, such as Some Religious Elements in English Literature, The Towers of Trebizond, essays about Jonathan Swift and "Religious Writing," and her biography of John Milton, to argue that wartime guilt and forgiveness regulate midcentury novelistic representation.
Novels are so often identified with development and Bildung - all implicitly about youthful characters in search of experience - that the representation of old age may be classed as an ...anti-novelistic phenomenon. In Memento Mori, Muriel Spark focuses on a group of characters over 70 years old in order to weigh the physiological and spiritual dimensions of ageing. Her working notes for the novel, now archived at the University of Tulsa, indicate that she researched her subject by dipping into Adolf Vischer's Old Age: Its Compensations and Rewards (1947) and Alex Comfort's The Biology of Senescence (1956). She reworked a considerable amount of material from these sources into the plot and phrasing of Memento Mori. In this early novel, Spark elaborates a novelistic gerontography, which I define as the textual representation of old age that accounts for a humane, non-scientific experience of age.
This volume collects for the first time essays published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime as well as essays which have never been published before. The range of ...subjects alone makes these essays indispensable reading.
Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in "Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among international delegates scrabbling to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House": owners evacuated during the war return to their houses empty since 1939. Other essays in this volume, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable mid-century evaluations of the state of literature.
The essays assembled in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any collection. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period.
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