The Spy’s version: three novels on the Cambridge Five

Authors

  • Sara Sullam University of Milan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i4.7490

Keywords:

spy fiction, Cold War, Cambridge Five

Abstract

Focussing on three novels inspired by the Cambridge Five – John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Graham Greene’s The Human Factor (1978) and John Banville’s The Untouchable (1997) – I will show how, dealing with a crucial episode of the British Cold War, the three novelists re-use modes and themes of spy fiction to provide an alternative narrative on national identity and on the position of the UK on the global geopolitical map. I will argue that spy fiction (and its adaptations) is the genre that best captures the major transformations that the UK underwent as a consequence of the fall of the Empire.

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Author Biography

Sara Sullam, University of Milan

Sara Sullam teaches English literature at the University of Milan and is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Reading. Her research has focused on English modernism in a comparative perspective (she has authored several essays on Joyce, Isherwood, William Carlos Williams, Woolf) and on Anglo-Italian relationships in publishing after 1945. She has edited a themed issue of Il verri (56.2014) on free indirect discourse. She’s the author of Tra i generi. Virginia Woolf e il romanzo (Mimesis, 2016), Moll Flanders. Matrici (Mimesis, 2018) and Leggere Woolf (Carocci, 2020). She has translated Joyce’s essay into Italian (Lettere e saggi, il Saggiatore, 2016).

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Published

2020-12-21

How to Cite

Sullam, S. (2020). The Spy’s version: three novels on the Cambridge Five. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (4), 307–332. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i4.7490

Issue

No. 4 (2020): The representation of the Cold war in literature and the arts (1947-1989)

Section

Monographic section I

License

SigMa Journal is an open access, online publication, with licence:

cc-by-80x15_80

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