Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens
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 Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionaage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying to larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity.

Carlston argues that in the modern West, a distinctive position has been assigned to those perceived to be marginal to the nation because of non-visible religious, political, or sexual differences. Because these "invisible Others" existed somewhere between the wholly alien and the fully normative, they evoked acute anxieties about the security and cohesion of the nation-state. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments in which national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable. Concentrating specifically on the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Communist spies in the U.K., and the Rosenberg case in the United States, Carlston directly links twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers.
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Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens
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 Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionaage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying to larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity.

Carlston argues that in the modern West, a distinctive position has been assigned to those perceived to be marginal to the nation because of non-visible religious, political, or sexual differences. Because these "invisible Others" existed somewhere between the wholly alien and the fully normative, they evoked acute anxieties about the security and cohesion of the nation-state. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments in which national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable. Concentrating specifically on the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Communist spies in the U.K., and the Rosenberg case in the United States, Carlston directly links twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers.
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Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens

Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens

by Erin Carlston
Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens

Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens

by Erin Carlston

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Overview

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 Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionaage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying to larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity.

Carlston argues that in the modern West, a distinctive position has been assigned to those perceived to be marginal to the nation because of non-visible religious, political, or sexual differences. Because these "invisible Others" existed somewhere between the wholly alien and the fully normative, they evoked acute anxieties about the security and cohesion of the nation-state. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments in which national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable. Concentrating specifically on the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Communist spies in the U.K., and the Rosenberg case in the United States, Carlston directly links twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231136730
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 04/16/2013
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Erin G. Carlston is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she serves on the Board of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and has directed the Program in Sexuality Studies. Her previous publications include Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1998) and articles in Modern Fiction Studies, American Literary History, Aztlán, and Romanic Review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Citizens, Aliens, and Traitors
2. The Dreyfus Affair
3. Secret Dossiers
4. Truth Breathing Down the Neck of Fiction
5. The Ganelon Type
6. Strictly a Jewish Show
7. Conclusion
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Daniel Boyarin

Carlston's detailed, precise, rich, and innovative readings of both political texts and literary contexts manage to illuminate familiar territory and reveal features of the landscape not seen before. She succeeds brilliantly in seeing things hidden in plain sight, and her book is eye-opening as a result.

Joseph A. Boone

Double Agents is a brilliant study of the Dreyfus Affair, the Cambridge spy scandal, and the Rosenberg trial, in which national anxieties about homosexuals and Jews as 'invisible others' undermining the state from within not only erupt into public view but also inspire surprising imaginative responses. Making double agency a virtue rather than a vice, writers such as Marcel Proust, W. H. Auden, and Tony Kushner redefine conceptions of citizenship, loyalty, and difference to illuminate how society may evolve. Erin G. Carlston's research is impeccable, her touch deft, and her analysis compelling.

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