Parkes, Adam
TR 12:45 PM
Park Hall 0139
Reading authors from Buchan to Le Carré, this class will trace the development of a distinctively modern fictional genre in its literary, cultural, and political historical contexts from late Victorian imperialism to the Cold War. Our primary focus will be fixed on British writers and the ways in which they represent espionage in Britain and Europe. As well as studying a number of primary texts, we will read in the history of spy fiction and espionage. We will think about what spying and fiction have to do with each other. We will also consider how spy fiction emerges from various popular genres during and after the modernist period in literature and the arts. Other topics of discussion will include: espionage and empire; the world wars and the Cold War; ideological conflict and nation-states; nationality and identity in the modern surveillance state; gender, sexuality, and the family; spies in literature and popular cinema and television. The final project will offer an opportunity to examine recent variations on such themes in visual media.
Probable reading list:
Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (Vintage, 2002). ISBN: 0375713247. [The first edition of 1938 will be available on ELC.]
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Anchor, 2002). 0385721285
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Oxford UP, 2009). 0199537879
Len Deighton, The Ipcress File (Penguin, 2021. 978-0241505427)
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (Thomas & Mercer, 2012). 1612185436
George Orwell, 1984 (Signet, 1961). 9780451524935
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Penguin, 2013). 0143124757
Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion (Titan, 2013). 9781781161531. [This book can be a little hard to get hold of, but the first edition of 1941 will be available on ELC.]
All of these should be available from the UGA bookstore; all are definitely obtainable via amazon and/or amazon.co.uk, as well as linked second-hand sellers. Avid Bookshop in Five Points is also planning to stock some copies.