Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
317
result(s) for
"Secrecy in literature"
Sort by:
Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
\"Larvatus prodeo,\" announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: \"I come forward, masked.\" Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This beautifully written work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, Jon R. Snyder examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.
eBook
The Covert Sphere
In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four-a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy.
InThe Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, \"the covert sphere.\" One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to \"know,\" or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since-and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism.
The Covert Spheretraces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments-fromThe Manchurian Candidatethrough24-as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.
eBook
Secrets, lies and children's fiction
\"Many children learn from a very young age about the importance of always telling the truth. They also learn that telling lies is necessary if they are to survive in a world that paradoxically values the truth but practises deception. Secrets, Lies and Children's Fiction demonstrates how this paradox is played out in texts for children and young adults, how secrets and lies may be a necessary means for survival and adaptation, and how mendacity may have its virtues. Kerry Mallan examines a wide selection of international texts, spanning several decades, including picture books, novels, and films. By drawing on diverse fields of scholarship, Mallan makes important connections between children's literature, philosophical and moral complexities, and cultural and social tensions. Secrets, Lies and Children's Fiction provokes thinking about what passes as 'the truth', the consequences of truth telling and lying, and the sacrificial arbitrariness of scapegoating. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Covert Operations
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Book InCovert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the \"Parson's Tale,\" the \"Miller's Tale,\" theSecretum Secretorum, andSir Gawain and the Green Knightas well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past-and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.
eBook
Reading gossip in early eighteenth-century England
\"This book analyzes the relation between print cultures and eighteenth-century literary and political practices and, identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, offers readings of key texts that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction
Focussing on the upsurge of interest in the Second World War in contemporary British novels this monograph considers established writers including Muriel Spark Sarah Waters and Kazuo Ishiguro as well as newer voices such as Liz Jensen and Peter Ho Davies exploring the range of ways in which secrecy in particular has become a focal point for representations of the war.
eBook
Lure of the Arcane
Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Theodore Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations—drama, romance, epic, novel, opera—down to the thrillers of the twenty-first century.
Lure of the Arcane considers Euripides’s Bacchae, Andreae’s Chymical Wedding, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, among other seminal works. Mimicking the genre’s quest-driven narrative arc, the reader searches for the significance of conspiracy fiction and is rewarded with the author’s cogent reflections in the final chapter. After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco’s notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact “a secret without content.”
eBook