Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. By John von Heyking. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. 278p. $37.50.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 816-818
Author(s):  
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott

John von Heyking's inquiry into Augustine's politics of “longing” is a provocative contribution to the growing genre of “Augustine redux” literature written to resonate with our fin de siècle sensibilities. These valuable pearl-diving expeditions bridge scholarship and literate conversation, careful textual exegesis and political advocacy. Not surprisingly, they also illustrate the challenges of writing for multiple audiences with mixed messages. This work enters an already crowded field of recent crossover texts with Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo (2000), Gary Wills's Saint Augustine (1999), Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine (1996), and Jean Elshtain's Augustine and theLimits of Politics (1995). A further trip back in time to the Cold War and the politics of “realism” turns up Herbert Deane's The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (1963), another retrieval project written to persuade as well as inform. And this is just a very short list.

Post-Revisionist Cold War - Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–1947. By Robert M. Hathaway. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. x, 410 pp. - From War to Cold War, 1942–48. By Roy Douglas. New York: St. Martin's, 1981. ix, 224 pp. Photographs. $22.50. - The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–1947. By Terry H. Anderson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981. xi, 256 pp. $18.00. - The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War. By Robert L. Messer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. x, 282 pp. Illustrations. $19.95. - Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War. Edited by Thomas T. Hammond. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. 318 pp. $22.50. - Bitter Legacy: Polish-American Relations in the Wake of World War II. By Richard C. Lukas. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 191 pp. $16.00. - American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949. By Lawrence S. Wittner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. xii, 445 pp. - Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. By John Lewis Gaddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xi, 432 pp. $9.95, paper. - Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War. By William Taubman. New York: Norton, 1982. xii, 291 pp. $18.95. - Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II. By Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson. New York: Pergamon Press, 1982. vii, 320 pp. $35.00, cloth. $10.95, paper.

Slavic Review ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 662-668
Author(s):  
Vojtech Mastny

Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They 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. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


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