This volume brings together academics from the USA and across Europe to examine the nature, representations and perceptions of the figure of the spy in Europe between 1815 and 1914. As such, it is the first scholarly investigation of the genesis both of contemporary espionage and of the cultural imaginings associated with it.
Spies in European Culture, 1815-1914 sheds light on the founding moment of espionage and the use of secrecy in politics in the contemporary age. It successfully argues that the 19th century saw the development of a cultural-historical process in which disruptive novelties like the disguise, the secret and the double identity simultaneously assailed the spheres of the state, the self and the imaginary, ushering in distinctive features of society in the modern era in the process. This global phenomenon, in which state and society, but also reality and fiction, were profoundly intertwined, is therefore investigated by means of a transdisciplinary analysis that considers both the politico-institutional and the cultural planes that existed at the time.
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An historical exploration of the spy in Europe in the long 19th-century which extends to the varied and revealing representations and perceptions the figure has inspired.
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The circuit of the secret in reality and fiction, Elisabetta
Abignente and Laura Di Fiore
Part 1 Key aspects
1 Political spies in nineteenth-century Europe: A summary and overview,
Robert Justin Goldstein
2 Cover stories? Bibliographical itineraries into spy fiction studies
(19692019), Francesco Casales
Part 2 Transnational networks
3 Spies, secret agents and confidants: For an underground history of the
Carlist Wars, Alexandre Dupont
4 Policing political dissidence in Mediterranean port-cities during the long
Age of Revolutions (181571), Christos Aliprantis
5 The Dreyfus Affair and the genesis of the British spy story, 18941900 83,
Alessandra Crotti
Part 3 Secret, power and geopolitics at Europes borders
6 Imagined communities and geostrategic knowledge in The Riddle of the Sands,
Riccardo Capoferro
7 Stories of Italian spies and special agents in late-nineteenth-century
Egypt: The international struggle against anarchism in a colonial territory,
Costantino Paonessa
Part 4 Double identities, dissimulation and disguise
8 The Mouchard in panoramic literature, Michela Lo Feudo
9 False names, multiple nationalities: Spying in the nineteenth-century
Mediterranean area, Laura Di Fiore
10 Double identity and spy story topoi in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The
Secret Agent, Elisabetta Abignente
Index
Elisabetta Abignente is Researcher in Comparative Literatures at University of Naples Federico II, Italy. She is the author of three books and one edited volume in Italian.
Laura Di Fiore is Associate Professor in History of Political Institutions at University of Naples Federico II, Italy. She is author of three books in Italian, including Gli Invisibili. Polizia politica e agenti segreti nellOttocento borbonico (2018).
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