Semester
Summer
Date of Graduation
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
Lisa Weihman
Committee Member
Michael Germana
Committee Member
Joseph Hodge
Committee Member
Ann Rae
Abstract
The genre of spy fiction confronts a paradigm-shifting event in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. Despite critical speculation that the genre had outlived its usefulness, spy fiction writers navigate this period of transition, and the genre remains broadly popular with the reading public. This study examines how the work of Britain’s foremost espionage writer, John le Carré, navigates the changing geopolitical landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In mapping this terrain, one sees two distinct impulses emerge: a tendency to look inward and a tendency to look back. To look inward, the novels The Night Manager and The Constant Gardener reconfigure their conflicts to center on an amateur spy as he battles domestic antagonists who most often take the form of corrupt businessmen and government officials. Analyses of these novels will employ new economic criticism to demonstrate how, in casting neoliberal forces as the villains, the novels attempt to critique and push back against the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism.
The impulse to look back involves the trend of revisiting le Carré’s Cold War novels as film and television adaptations reconceptualized for twenty-first century audiences. The television adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl and the film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy both engage with their original contexts and speak to the contemporary moment. Exploring the relationship between novel and adaptation establishes the ways in which an adaptation like The Little Drummer Girl can update the novel’s gender politics and geopolitical alignment in ways that enlighten both the present and the past. Likewise, putting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in conversation with its Cold War context provides the audience with a clear warning about the dangers of nostalgizing the complexities of the Cold War. In exploring these two different areas of le Carré’s work, this study demonstrates the flexibility of the spy narrative and its continued relevance as a genre that can speak on the relevant issues of its time.
Recommended Citation
Hoag, Rachel Lynn, "Looking Inward, Looking Back: John le Carré and the Spy Narrative after the Cold War" (2023). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 12114.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/12114