Sam Goodman - British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power.

Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carr, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire.

This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.

Sam Goodman is Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. His primary research interests include twentieth-century fiction and medical humanities. He is also the editor of Medicine, Health & the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities (Routledge, 2013) with Victoria Bates (Bristol) and Alan Bleakley (Plymouth).

1 Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty
Andrew John Miller

2 Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity
The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction
Peta Mitchell

3 Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption
Eating the Avant-Garde
Michel Delville

4 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema
Jason Borge

5 Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall
Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics
Les Brookes

6 Anglophone Jewish Literature
Axel Sthler

7 Before Auschwitz
Irne Nmirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France
Angela Kershaw

8 Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature
Lindsey Michael Banco

9 Diary Poetics
Form and Style in Writers Diaries, 19151962
Anna Jackson

10 Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change
Race, Sex and Nation
Gerardine Meaney

11 Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern
Neil R. Davison

12 Travel and Modernist Literature
Sacred and Ethical Journeys
Alexandra Peat

13 Primo Levis Narratives of Embodiment
Containing the Human
Charlotte Ross

14 Italo Calvinos Architecture of Lightness
The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis
Letizia Modena

15 Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Womens Food Writing
The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David
Alice L. McLean

16 Making Space in the Works of James Joyce
Edited by Valrie Bnjam and John Bishop

17 Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature
Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk

18 Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders
Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes

19 Global Cold War Literature
Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives
Edited by Andrew Hammond

20 Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdies Fiction
Ursula Kluwick

21 Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism
Edited by Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout

22 Locating Gender in Modernism
The Outsider Female
Geetha Ramanathan

23 Autobiographies of Others
Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction
Lucia Boldrini

24 Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism
The Haunting Interval
Luke Thurston

25 Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics
The Origin and Evolution of American Stories
Betina Entzminger

26 AIDS Literature and Gay Identity
The Literature of Loss
Monica B. Pearl

27 The Epic Trickster in American Literature
From Sunjata to S(o)ul
Gregory Rutledge

28 Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement
Paul Clements

29 Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature
Novel Listening
Justin St. Clair

30 Poetry as Testimony
Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems
Antony Rowland

31 Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction
William Vesterman

32 James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture
The Einstein of English Fiction
Jeffrey S. Drouin

33 British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire
Sam Goodman

First published 2016
by Routledge
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2016 Taylor & Francis

The right of Sam Goodman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodman, Sam, 1980
British spy fiction and the end of empire / By Sam Goodman
pages cm.(Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature; 36)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Spy stories, EnglishHistory and criticism. 2. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory20th century. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. National characteristics in literature. 5. World politics in literature. 6. Espionage in literature. 7. Spies in literature. I. Title.

PR830.S65G66 2015
823.087209dc23 2015004928

ISBN: 978-1-138-77746-0 (hbk)