BOOK NEWS: Probing gender and sexuality in spy fiction

Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage: Spying Undercover(s)

EDITED BY ANN REA 

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350271364

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sexuality-and-gender-in-fictions-of-espionage-9781350271364/

An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Covering texts such as the Bond novels, John Le Carré's oeuvre (and their notable adaptations) and works by Helen MacInnes, Christopher Isherwood and Mick Herron, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage takes stock of spy fiction written by women, female protagonists written by men, and probes the representations of masculinity generated by male authors. Offering a counterpoint to a genre traditionally viewed as male-centric, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage proposes a revision of masculinity, femininity, queer identities and gendered concepts such as domesticity, and relates them to notions of nationality and the defense work conducted at crucial moments in history.

Contents:

1. "Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (Megan Faragher, Wright State University, Ohio)
2. "Vanished Ladies: Using Helen MacInnes's Above Suspicion to Look at Women in Spy Fiction" (Kyle Smith, Perth College UHI, Scotland)
3. "While Still We Live: Gender, Secret Agents, and National Ethics" (Michael T. Williamson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
4. "'Some Other Man Who Would Have to be Set Aside:' Burgess, Maclean, and the Adversarial Spy in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love" (Oliver Buckton, Florida Atlantic University)
5. "Bond, Colonialism and the 'Other'" (Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth)
6. "'Learn, Babies, Learn': Race, Representation, and John Birch Society Activists Julia Brown and Lola Belle Holmes" (Veronica Wilson, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
7. "'A New Domesticity' and Masculinity in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Len Deighton's The Ipcress File" (Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
8. "A Queer Thing: The Older Woman Spy" (Rosie White, Northumbria University)
9. "'What's the character?' Adapting Agency and Gender in The Little Drummer Girl" (Rachel Hoag, West Virginia University)
10. "'Extolling the Virtues of Alpaca Cloth or Buttons Made of Tagua Nut': The Influence of Douglas Hayward and Tailoring in John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama (Llewella Chapman, University of East Anglia)
11. "'Darling Men, Lover Boys and Rogues:' Connie Sachs, Molly Doran and the Precarity of of Institutional Memory in John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mick Herron's Dead Lions" (Paul Lohneis, University of West London)
12. Coda: Ann Rea, Stella Rimington, "The 'Open Secret' and the 'Mission to Inform'”

Ann Rea is professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. She is co-editor of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series with Nick Hubbleand she also edited the essay collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse in 2015.

Book News: British Fiction in the Turbulent 1970s

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

By J. RUSSELL PERKIN

McGill-Queen's UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780228006244

https://www.mqup.ca/politics-and-the-british-novel-in-the-1970s-products-9780228006244.php?page_id=73&

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success - a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.

"Russell Perkin's emphasis on the ways in which fiction reflects political currents and discussions in the 1970s offers an original and much-needed contribution to our understanding of this tumultuous and neglected period." Caroline Zoe Krzakowski, Northern Michigan University

J. Russell Perkin is professor of English at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada.