Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
This paper focuses on the entry of women as heroic figures into the middlebrow British spy story, written during and after the Great War, and interrogates the questions of identity and self that this entry raises. At the core of these stories is an effort to broach questions of patriotism, identity and femininity. However, the fin de siècle conception of heroism that feeds later attitudes towards the hero seems to only allow men to occupy heroic positions. The term ‘hero’ is implicitly gendered (Dilley, 1998: 141). Compounding this, the field of espionage is stigmatised by its associations with criminality and negative femininity. For their female characters to achieve, these stories thus must renegotiate the terms by which heroic activity is permitted; at the same time, as they must redefine espionage activity as heroic. Drawing from several authors, Emma's paper will focus especially on E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Miss Brown of XYO (1927) and Mrs Baillie Reynolds’s short story ‘Cazalet’s Secretary’ (1921) to discuss how these examined, readdressed and in some cases reinvented conceptions of British feminine heroism and the heroic capacity of women.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Oct 2012 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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