Espionage literature and the training of the modern British hero

British spy fiction arose at the end of the nineteenth century, and proliferated between the end of the Boer War in 1902 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. My dissertation, "Espionage Literature and the Training of the British Hero," uses both popular and canonical works involving espionage, as well as contemporary nonfiction and historical sources, to argue that the new genre's rise coincided with a changing perception of the amateur hero in British literature, society, and politics. While Victorian popular literature was dominated by the heroic type of an amateur patriot whose skills and values derive from a sporting background, at the end of the nineteenth century a loss of British self-confidence gave rise to doubt in the efficacy of the British amateur hero. My dissertation argues that spies and spy-hunters, who are poised between the categories of amateur and professional, emerged in the literature of this period to offer a modern alternative to the traditional amateur hero. The new, pragmatic heroes of pre-war counterintelligence literature, more concerned with concrete results than with the pleasures of adventure or upper-class standards of honor, represented an evolving perspective on Britain's Empire and rivals, a perspective that anticipated the reassessment and reshaping of sporting British heroism that followed World War I. In my dissertation I contrast the paranoid works of counterspy fiction by authors such as William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim with the more sportsmanlike spy fiction of Erskine Childers and Rudyard Kipling, as well as authors such as John Buchan who could write in both modes. I also study the figure of the spy in crime fiction, examining undercover detectives in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Conrad's The Secret Agent. Finally, I show the ways in which spy fiction in general was intended to train readers themselves as spy and counterspy heroes and thus create a new model of British heroism.