Double agents: espionage, literature, and liminal citizens

by Carlston, Erin G.

Type Book

Rate 0.0 /5

Details

Files

Reviews

Download

Title Statements

Full title :Double agents : espionage, literature, and liminal citizens / Erin G. Carlston.

Summary

Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century? Erin G. Carlston believes such figures and themes were critical to exploring citizenship and its limits, requirements, and possibilities in the modern Western state. Through close readings of Proust's novels, Auden's poetry, and Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying into larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments when national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable, linking the twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers. -- Book Jacket.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:©2013.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Columbia University Press
Place of Publication:New York
Language:eng
Publication Date:©2013.

The Physical Object

Description:xii, 332 pages : : illustrations ; : 24 cm

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9780231136723, 0231136722, 9780231136730, 0231136730, 9780231510097, 0231510098
oclc:ocn810947010
LC Classification:PN51
Dewey Decimal:809/.93358

Citizens, aliens, and traitors -- The Dreyfus Affair -- Secret dossiers -- Truth breathing down the neck of fiction -- The Ganelon type -- Strictly a Jewish show.

Subjects

Communists in literature Espionage Espionage -- History Espionnage -- Histoire History Homosexualité et littérature Homosexuality and literature Jews in literature Juifs dans la littérature Liminalité dans la littérature Liminality in literature Literature and society Littérature et société Trahison dans la littérature Treason in literature