This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

2017 Contributors

ALEX BELSEY is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, affiliated with the Department of English and the Centre for Life-writing Research (CLWR). His research specialization is life-writing, with a particular focus on diary and journal forms, experimental auto/biography, and autofiction. Current research interests include representations and narratives of identity formation by, and about, visual artists from the 19th century to present. Belsey completed a PhD in English Research at King’s College London with a thesis on the journal of British painter Keith Vaughan (1912-77) and is currently preparing a monograph on Vaughan's journal, titled "Image of a Man," for publication. He has also written on the life and works of Irène Némirovsky (1903-42) and has a continuing interest in the autobiographical novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). [return to article]

ERIN G. CARLSTON teaches English at the University of Auckland. Before coming to Auckland, she was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests are in comparative modernisms, sexuality studies and Jewish studies. She is the author of Thinking Fascism (1998) and Double Agents (2013), as well as articles on Wyndham Lewis, Alfredo Véa, Marcel Proust, Paul Celan, Mary Renault, and Audre Lorde, among others. Her current research project is on race and masculinities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Carlston is co-organizer of the New Zealand Modernist Studies Consortium. [return to article]

BENEDETTA CARNAGHI is a PhD student in History at Cornell University. Her dissertation is a comparative history of double agents in the Fascist secret police, called OVRA, and its Nazi counterpart, the Gestapo. Her research highlights the international nature of this spy network, which transcended national boundaries just as spies transcended their sense of national identity. Hence both Nazi and Fascist spies carried out their activities not only in Germany and Italy, but also in occupied countries. Her research interests include the history of Resistance, the Holocaust, gender studies, political violence, and terror. [return to article]

STUART CHRISTIE is Head and Professor of the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Worlding Forster: The Passage from Pastoral (Routledge, 2005), Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature (Palgrave, 2009), and the co-editor of Modern American Poetry and the Chinese Encounter (Palgrave, 2012). He has published over fifty refereed outputs in venues such as Modern Fiction Studies, College Literature, PMLA, Foreign Literature Studies, American Indian Quarterly, and Modernism/modernity Print+. He is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Literature Compass. [return to article]

PAULA DERDIGER is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, where she works on modern and contemporary British literature and culture as well as film studies. She has published on Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, and Colin MacInnes, and her monograph on postwar British literature and housing, Reconstruction Fiction, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. [return to article]

MEGAN FARAGHER is an Assistant Professor of English at Wright State University–Lake Campus. Her work focuses on the influence of information culture and propaganda studies on twentieth-century literature and culture. Her current book project, "Forms of Persuasion: Literature and Culture and the New Age of Public Opinion," articulates the connection between aesthetic developments in the twentieth-century and the evolving fields of polling and public opinion research. She has previously published in Textual Practice, and received her PhD at the State University of New York at Buffalo. [return to article]

DAVID GLOVER is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on popular literature and cultural history and is a member of the Editorial Board of new formations: a journal of cultural/theory/politics. His books include, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (1996), Genders (2000; 2nd ed. in 2009; with Cora Kaplan), and Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: a Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act (2012). He is currently working on a study of law, literature and citizenship in Britain in the 1940s. [return to article]

MARK DAVID KAUFMAN is Assistant Professor of English at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Public Domain Review, European Journal of American Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Virginia Woolf Miscellany. His contribution to the special issue of The Space Between on espionage is part of a larger book project focusing on the relationship between modernism and national security, the weaponization of the humanities during wartime, and the cultivation of writers as spies by the intelligence community. [return to article]

JOHN KIMSEY is an Associate Professor in DePaul University’s School for New Learning, where he teaches and writes about popular culture, modern literature and their intersections. His essays have appeared in Popular Music and Society, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. His writings on Beatles music and culture have appeared in numerous academic anthologies, including The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles (2009). The recipient of a DePaul Humanities Center fellowship, his song cycle Twisted Roots: Music, Politics and the American Dream Blues has been described by jazz polymath Ben Sidran as “an ingenious way to integrate political and social commentary into a musical architecture.” He is currently working on a book, “'Just A Day Too Long': Music, Race, and Parchman Farm." [return to article]

PHYLLIS LASSNER is Professor Emerita in the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Gender Studies and Writing Programs at Northwestern University. In addition to essays on interwar and wartime women writers and on Holocaust representation, her publications include two books on Elizabeth Bowen, British Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, and Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film. She was the International Diamond Jubilee Fellow at Southampton University, UK, 2015-2017 and is Editor of the Northwestern University Press Series, “Cultural Expressions of World War II: Interwar Preludes, Responses, Memory.” Her current research focuses on recent Holocaust films and Jewish refugee art in Britain. [return to article]

WILL MAY is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton. He is the editor of The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (published in the US as All The Poems), and the author of Postwar Literature: 1950-1990 and Stevie Smith and Authorship. He has also published on Elizabeth Taylor, Harriet Cohen, and Barbara Pym. His current research explores the relationship between whimsy, politics, and poetics. [return to article]

REBECAH PULSIFER is an Assistant Professor of English at Kettering University. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel and Journal of Modern Literature. She is at work on a book manuscript that traces changing understandings of intelligence in mid-twentieth century literature and culture. [return to article]

SLANEY CHADWICK ROSS is adjunct Professor of English at Fordham University. Her research engages with secret histories, spy narratives, and the culture of surveillance in the eighteenth century. Her work has been published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and she is working on a book on the cultural history of spying in the eighteenth century. [return to article]

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:
1. International Intrigue: Plotting Espionage as Cultural Artifact | Editors' Introduction
2. Rebecca West and the "Radio Traitor": The 1351 Treason Act in 1945 This essay examines a major shift in Rebecca West’s status as a public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, focussing upon her reports on a series of treason trials in London, notably that of the German propagandist William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”. Despite the widespread fear that Joyce’s broadcasts evoked, including the belief that his programmes were fed by a large network of spies and fifth columnists, his conviction and subsequent execution was controversial, largely because his defence counsel was able to prove that he was an American citizen and not a subject of the British Crown. West’s bestselling book The Meaning of Treason (1947) has been cited as the definitive argument that Joyce was morally guilty, even though his punishment effectively rested upon a legal technicality. To assess the validity of this claim, the essay considers West’s dissection of Joyce’s character, his past, and his politics, and especially her uncanny suggestion that “a drop or two of treason in their veins” helps to inoculate patriotic subjects against the temptation of disloyalty. This essay examines a major shift in Rebecca West’s status as a public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, focussing upon her reports on a series of treason trials in London, notably that of the German propagandist William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”. Despite the widespread fear that Joyce’s broadcasts evoked, including the belief that his programmes were fed by a large network of spies and fifth columnists, his conviction and subsequent execution was controversial, largely because his defence counsel was able to prove that he was an American citizen and not a subject of the British Crown. West’s bestselling book The Meaning of Treason (1947) has been cited as the definitive argument that Joyce was morally guilty, even though his punishment effectively rested upon a legal technicality. To assess the validity of this claim, the essay considers West’s dissection of Joyce’s character, his past, and his politics, and especially her uncanny suggestion that “a drop or two of treason in their veins” helps to inoculate patriotic subjects against the temptation of disloyalty.
3. Spyography: Compton Mackenzie, Modernism, and the Intelligence Memoir This article traces the interwar emergence of the spyography, a mode of life-writing that shares much in common with literary modernism, including a fraught legal history. More specifically, this essay focuses on Compton Mackenzie, the Scottish novelist turned SIS agent who violated the UK Official Secrets Act by writing about his experiences in his WWI intelligence memoir, Greek Memories (1932). Taking into consideration Mackenzie’s wartime experiences, his subsequent legal battle, and his vindictive spy-farce, Water on the Brain (1933), this paper argues that spyography is a modernist genre in its own right, a contested narrative that trades on the pleasures of secrecy and revelation, blurs the line between fact and fiction, and redefines the relationship between literature and national security. This article traces the interwar emergence of the spyography, a mode of life-writing that shares much in common with literary modernism, including a fraught legal history. More specifically, this essay focuses on Compton Mackenzie, the Scottish novelist turned SIS agent who violated the UK Official Secrets Act by writing about his experiences in his WWI intelligence memoir, Greek Memories (1932). Taking into consideration Mackenzie’s wartime experiences, his subsequent legal battle, and his vindictive spy-farce, Water on the Brain (1933), this paper argues that spyography is a modernist genre in its own right, a contested narrative that trades on the pleasures of secrecy and revelation, blurs the line between fact and fiction, and redefines the relationship between literature and national security.
4. “Now you’re one of us”: Postwar Surveillance in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films. This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films.
5. Snoop-Women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation’s qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO’s methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison’s novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents a clash between these two gendered methods of understanding public opinion. Through its advocacy of subjective epistemology against the fetish for so-called objective data, Mitchison’s interwar novel suggests the importance of gender to debates over data collection and polling. Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation’s qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO’s methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison’s novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents a clash between these two gendered methods of understanding public opinion. Through its advocacy of subjective epistemology against the fetish for so-called objective data, Mitchison’s interwar novel suggests the importance of gender to debates over data collection and polling.
6. Intelligence and Information in the Espionage Fiction of Dennis Wheatley This article examines the spy novels of Dennis Wheatley as exemplars of espionage fiction's desire to grapple with changing understandings of the role of the individual in the field of intelligence services. Wheatley's crackerjack spy, Gregory Sallust, is adept at both mastering and synthesizing information, and this skill set puts him at odds with prevailing mid-century trends in information theory, which tended to view human intelligence as incapable of effectively analyzing the large amounts of data that technological advances made available for the first time. Wheatley's Sallust, a prototype of James Bond who blends analytical brilliance with intense personality, is a striking example of the ways in which espionage fiction between the wars negotiated a desire to privilege human experience against new understandings of both human intelligence and intelligence gathering. This article examines the spy novels of Dennis Wheatley as exemplars of espionage fiction's desire to grapple with changing understandings of the role of the individual in the field of intelligence services. Wheatley's crackerjack spy, Gregory Sallust, is adept at both mastering and synthesizing information, and this skill set puts him at odds with prevailing mid-century trends in information theory, which tended to view human intelligence as incapable of effectively analyzing the large amounts of data that technological advances made available for the first time. Wheatley's Sallust, a prototype of James Bond who blends analytical brilliance with intense personality, is a striking example of the ways in which espionage fiction between the wars negotiated a desire to privilege human experience against new understandings of both human intelligence and intelligence gathering.
7. Pearl S. Buck’s FBI File, 1938–1945 This article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI files on American writer Pearl S. Buck compiled before and during the Second World War. The argument establishes a crux between literary production and Cold War ideology, such that the FBI, backed by emerging technologies of surveillance, sought to create near-evidentiary “realities” out of what were merely literary tastes and ideological propensities. I call this powerful, period curtailment of literary interpretive range, in the context of the Second Red Scare, evidentiary realism. As privileged readers who constructed their own canons out of published materials, deemed acceptable or unacceptable, FBI case managers “close-read” literary materials for evidence of political subversion. Where they could not locate direct and actionable evidence of subversion in Buck's literary texts or pronouncements, case managers activated otherwise latent data by providing crucial interpretive links joining disparate signifying chains. Likewise buoyed by the ad hoc submission of data delivered along networks of enthusiastic volunteer informants nationwide, such government-backed interpretive communities, formal and informal, imposed strikingly narrow (statist) regimes of literary preference. At the same time, officials at the FBI enforced modes of censorship—alternating between the selective suppression of pertinent information and its opportune release—when delivering classified, confidential, or otherwise inaccessible information to the public. This article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI files on American writer Pearl S. Buck compiled before and during the Second World War. The argument establishes a crux between literary production and Cold War ideology, such that the FBI, backed by emerging technologies of surveillance, sought to create near-evidentiary “realities” out of what were merely literary tastes and ideological propensities. I call this powerful, period curtailment of literary interpretive range, in the context of the Second Red Scare, evidentiary realism. As privileged readers who constructed their own canons out of published materials, deemed acceptable or unacceptable, FBI case managers “close-read” literary materials for evidence of political subversion. Where they could not locate direct and actionable evidence of subversion in Buck's literary texts or pronouncements, case managers activated otherwise latent data by providing crucial interpretive links joining disparate signifying chains. Likewise buoyed by the ad hoc submission of data delivered along networks of enthusiastic volunteer informants nationwide, such government-backed interpretive communities, formal and informal, imposed strikingly narrow (statist) regimes of literary preference. At the same time, officials at the FBI enforced modes of censorship—alternating between the selective suppression of pertinent information and its opportune release—when delivering classified, confidential, or otherwise inaccessible information to the public.
8. Three Layers of Ambiguity: Homosexual Spies and International Intrigue in Fascist Italy This article delves into the stories of two foreign queer spies in Fascist Italy, the Swiss Roberto Hodel and the German Gerhard Dobbert. The Fascist regime cultivated a dual relationship with homosexuals: it exploited them for their contacts, but persecuted them as “enemies of the new man” who undermined the Fascist understanding of morality. This article aims at illustrating this relationship, by focusing on these two cases and ultimately proving that the Fascist surveillance—like any other—is doomed to fail, because these double agents are “imperfect” tools. Spies live in a gray zone of blurred agencies and conflicting incentives. Like in fiction, where characters play a deceitful role, the archival documents analyzed in this essay replicate that deception in three layers of ambiguity. Just as spy novels become open-ended trajectories of several stages of suspicion, these layers of ambiguity are multiplied in the spies’ surveillance reports, where the distrust of the foreign alien is combined with the rejection of homosexuality to designate an extremely ambiguous “other” that the Fascists both reject and take advantage of. This article delves into the stories of two foreign queer spies in Fascist Italy, the Swiss Roberto Hodel and the German Gerhard Dobbert. The Fascist regime cultivated a dual relationship with homosexuals: it exploited them for their contacts, but persecuted them as “enemies of the new man” who undermined the Fascist understanding of morality. This article aims at illustrating this relationship, by focusing on these two cases and ultimately proving that the Fascist surveillance—like any other—is doomed to fail, because these double agents are “imperfect” tools. Spies live in a gray zone of blurred agencies and conflicting incentives. Like in fiction, where characters play a deceitful role, the archival documents analyzed in this essay replicate that deception in three layers of ambiguity. Just as spy novels become open-ended trajectories of several stages of suspicion, these layers of ambiguity are multiplied in the spies’ surveillance reports, where the distrust of the foreign alien is combined with the rejection of homosexuality to designate an extremely ambiguous “other” that the Fascists both reject and take advantage of.
9. “The Ends of a State”: James Angleton, Counterintelligence and the New Criticism Before becoming CIA counterintelligence chief during the high Cold War, James Angleton was an acolyte of Modernist poetry and booster of the New Critics, many of whom he cultivated pre-World War II when, as an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded the avant-garde journal Furioso. Recruited into the OSS by Yale’s Norman Pearson, Angleton recruited individuals associated with the New Criticism into postwar counterintelligence work, which he described, adapting Eliot, as “a wilderness of mirrors.” Detailing such connections, this essay further argues that certain principles – as well as contradictions – of New Critical thought inform Angelton’s counterintelligence practice. I.A. Richards’ notion of poetry as “pseudo-statement,” i.e., a form of deception that is morally defensible because it affirms life in the face of dehumanizing mechanism (the latter being seen as a force which menaces the modern West) is key, as is John Crowe Ransom’s call for a criticism that will be formalist, objective and ontological, which is to say abstracted from that which is “merely” personal, political and/or sociohistorical. In this connection, I show that the New Critics’ persistent practice of opposing poetry to rhetoric – with the former seen as solitary spiritual quest and the latter as mass manipulation for political ends – echoes Plato’s quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, but with the binary reframed as a contrast/contest between language arts. I contend that, for a figure such as Angleton, disinformation and deception – supposed hallmarks of rhetoric and totalitarianism – are necessary if democracy, which Ransom compares to a beautiful poem, is to survive. Before becoming CIA counterintelligence chief during the high Cold War, James Angleton was an acolyte of Modernist poetry and booster of the New Critics, many of whom he cultivated pre-World War II when, as an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded the avant-garde journal Furioso. Recruited into the OSS by Yale’s Norman Pearson, Angleton recruited individuals associated with the New Criticism into postwar counterintelligence work, which he described, adapting Eliot, as “a wilderness of mirrors.” Detailing such connections, this essay further argues that certain principles – as well as contradictions – of New Critical thought inform Angelton’s counterintelligence practice. I.A. Richards’ notion of poetry as “pseudo-statement,” i.e., a form of deception that is morally defensible because it affirms life in the face of dehumanizing mechanism (the latter being seen as a force which menaces the modern West) is key, as is John Crowe Ransom’s call for a criticism that will be formalist, objective and ontological, which is to say abstracted from that which is “merely” personal, political and/or sociohistorical. In this connection, I show that the New Critics’ persistent practice of opposing poetry to rhetoric – with the former seen as solitary spiritual quest and the latter as mass manipulation for political ends – echoes Plato’s quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, but with the binary reframed as a contrast/contest between language arts. I contend that, for a figure such as Angleton, disinformation and deception – supposed hallmarks of rhetoric and totalitarianism – are necessary if democracy, which Ransom compares to a beautiful poem, is to survive.
10. Dancing with Boatmen, or the Retirement of the Spy: Espionage and Community in W.H. Auden’s Poetry This article questions and complicates the argument previously made by critics of W.H. Auden’s work—including myself—that Auden’s early poetry participates in the discourse of espionage through encryption, concealment, or masquerade, and that it is therefore peculiarly difficult in a way that Auden’s later work is not. In this piece I pinpoint Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger! as the publication in which the trope of espionage is first turned to a new and different purpose, and then virtually abandoned for the rest of Auden’s life, and argue that there is greater thematic and political continuity between Auden’s pre-war and post-war poetry than I and others have previously suggested. This article questions and complicates the argument previously made by critics of W.H. Auden’s work—including myself—that Auden’s early poetry participates in the discourse of espionage through encryption, concealment, or masquerade, and that it is therefore peculiarly difficult in a way that Auden’s later work is not. In this piece I pinpoint Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger! as the publication in which the trope of espionage is first turned to a new and different purpose, and then virtually abandoned for the rest of Auden’s life, and argue that there is greater thematic and political continuity between Auden’s pre-war and post-war poetry than I and others have previously suggested.
11. Review Essay | Memory and Prophecy in the Space Between
12. Book Review | Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film
13. Book Review | Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights
14. Book Review | Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II
15. Book Review | At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture
16. Book Review | Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing
17. Book Review | Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts
18. 2017 Contributors