Parkes, Adam
MW 1 :50 PM
Park Hall 0136
Reading authors from Buchan to Le Carré, this class will trace the development of a distinctively modern fictional genre in its literary and 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; spies in literature and popular cinema.
Students signing up for Fall 2020 will need reliable access to the internet for online portions of the course (we will use some combination of email, ELC and Zoom).
Please obtain print copies of the paperback editions listed below (all will be available from the UGA bookstore and from Avid Books in Five Points):
Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (Vintage, 2002). ISBN: 0375713247
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Anchor, 2002). 0385721285
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, ed. Christopher Harvie (Oxford UP, 2009). 0199537879
Len Deighton, The Ipcress File (HarperCollins 2015). 0008124787
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 McInnes, Above Suspicion (Titan, 2013). 9781781161531