ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the ways the spy thriller narrates the crises and contradictions in ideologies of nation and Empire and of class and gender, seeing whether they subvert or reinforce the surface coding of the global politics of spies and counterspies and it's also sees what these stories can tell about twentieth-century British culture. It focuses primarily on popular fiction, it seems to me that the study of 'popular' fiction and the study of 'literary' fiction must not be seen as two separate disciplines but rather as parts of a reconstituted literary studies, that aspect of cultural studies which focuses on the production and consumption of narratives and figurative language and argues that the significance of these stories lies as much in their form as in their content. The book explores the relation between narrative structures and ideology, drawing on several bodies of theoretical work.
