Eric Ambler’s Novels

Critiquing Modernity

Robert Lance Snyder

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781793614193
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Eric Ambler's first six novels released between 1936 and 1940 quickly established his reputation as a master craftsman of intrigue and espionage narratives. Far less often discussed are the twelve Cold War novels he published, after an eleven-year hiatus as a screenwriter, between 1951 and 1981. This study argues that his entire corpus manifests late modernism's impulse toward a broadly social, political, and cultural critique of the times. Ambler's fiction from the mid-1950s onward is also remarkable for its ludic turn as he assesses the self-deceptions of an increasingly bureaucratized and media-focused world blind to its own follies. In these later works can be seen elements of what has come to be known as postmodernism, though in his commitment to chronicling the juggernaut of modernity he remains a uniquely independent witness of what is now being called the long twentieth century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 On the Eve of Cataclysm: “A Civilization Hastening to Destruction”
• 2 Fascismo, Espionage, and War’s Contagion: “‘Modernity’ à la Marinetti”
• 3 Postwar Theaters of Deception: Show Trials, Brigandage, and Military Coups d’État
• 4 Ambler’s Ludic Turn: Yeah, But What Exactly Is So Funny?
• 5 International Connivance and Disinformation: Private Armies, Narrative Reconstructions, and Middle Eastern Terrorism
• 6 Final Soundings: What, If Anything, Has Changed?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author