British Spy Fiction: Genre, History and Popular Culture

The British have made a profound contribution to espionage fiction, the popular genre proving a convenient vehicle for presenting narratives of adventure and models of national heroism, as well as commentaries on class, corruption, betrayal, and decline. Authors such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré have found large international audiences for their espionage stories, and it has been commonly believed that the thriller more generally claims the largest share of the popular readership. Similarly, the secret agent on screen has been a vital genre, especially since the phenomenal success of James Bond in the cinema beginning in the 1960s. The research project will particularly address the underrepresented areas of recent British spy literature and of the `spyscreen`, the re-visioning of spy narratives in film and television. It will seek to assess new writing since the time of Glasnost and the end of the Cold War, and its realignment to new security conditions and threats. A particular emphasis of the research will be on the treatment of espionage and the figure of the secret agent on screen, especially in the important period since 1960, which saw the translation of such leading novelists as Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carré to both cinema and television. The research will therefore conform and contribute to the established interest in genre in cinema and television which has informed British screen studies in recent times, and extend critical work on literary spy fiction in Britain last seriously attempted in the 1980s. The study will necessitate archival work in the United Kingdom, principally at the British Film Institute London and the Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, to assess primary literature in the form of film and television reviews and criticism, cinema trade periodicals, newspapers and magazines, and to view film and television dramas. The methodology to be used in the research project is one widely adopted in the scholarly treatment of British film and television, an empirically-grounded research project informed by the three broad characteristics as identified in the New Film History (Chapman, Harper and Glancy, 2007): a methodological sophistication which is sensitive to the production and reception contexts of cinema and television as well as the representational potential of the screen; an acknowledgement of the central importance of primary sources, both filmic and non-filmic; and the appreciation of film and television dramas as cultural artefacts with their own specific signifying practices. The approach will allow for the historical reconstruction of contexts of production and reception as well as close interpretative analysis of spy films and dramas in British cinema and television. The research project on British Spy Fiction will be conducted within, and supported by, the established infrastructure of academic research into British culture studies at the Institute for English and American Studies, Universitaet Klagenfurt.

No additional funding sources recorded.