'Espionage and Exile is set to advance scholarship in the field of spy fiction. It is original, daring, carefully arranged and argued. Lassner offers a new understanding of espionage literature, one that moves interpretation far beyond the preoccupation with genre, formulae, masculinity or realism.'Allan Hepburn, McGill UniversityAnalyses mid-twentieth-century British spy thrillers as resistance to political oppressionEspionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War British writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, John le Carré, Pamela Frankau and filmmaker Leslie Howard combine propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Their spy fictions deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. With politically charged suspense and compelling plots and characters, these writers challenge distinctions between villain and victim and exile and belonging by dramatising relationships between stateless refugees, British agents, and most dramatically, between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crisis.Phyllis Lassner is a Professor at The Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, The Gender Studies and Cook Family Writing Programs at Northwestern University. She is the author of British Women Writers of World War II (1998), Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (2004) and Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust (2009) as well as articles about Holocaust representation.

She is Editor of the book series Cultural Expressions of World War II.