Double Agents

Description:

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.

subjects: American literature, history and criticism,  Communists in literature,  Literature and society,  Jews in literature,  Liminality in literature,  Treason in literature,  Homosexuality and literature,  Espionage,  History,  SOCIAL SCIENCE,  Gay Studies,  LITERARY CRITICISM,  Semiotics & Theory