Reading Espionage Fiction

[headline]Explores how espionage fiction captures the most significant political conflicts and crises of the last hundred years Reading Espionage Fiction: Narrative, Conflict and Commitment from World War I to the Contemporary Era probes the ways in which the struggles and loyalties of political modernity have been portrayed in the espionage story over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading works by authors such as Somerset Maugham, Helen MacInnes, John le Carré, Sam E. Greenlee and Gerald Seymour as popular literature deserving of sustained attention, this book shows how these narratives have both created a modern genre and, at the same time, sought an escape from its limitations. Martin Griffin takes up the importance of plot and character and argues that, in this branch of fiction, the personal has always and ever been political. [biography]Martin Griffin is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900 (2009), co-author of Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (with Constance DeVereaux, 2013), and co-editor of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience (with Christopher Hebert, 2017).