Bøker av Allan Hepburn

Enchanted Objects investigates the relationship between visual art and contemporary fiction, addressing the problems that arise when paintings, deluxe books, porcelains, or statues are represented in contemporary novels. The distinction between objects and art objects depends on aesthetics. While some objects are authenticated through museum exhibits, others are hidden, broken, neglected, coveted, hoarded, or salvaged.Allan Hepburn asks four broad questions about aesthetics and value: What is a detail in visual art? Is all art ornamental? Does the value of an object increase because it is fragile? What defines ugliness? Contemporary novels, such as Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin, and Bruce Chatwin's Utz offer implicit answers to these questions while critiquing museums and the determination to invest objects with value through display. Addressing current debates in museum studies, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism, Enchanted Objects develops an extensive theory of how contemporary literature engages with and relates to aesthetic objects.

Troubled Legacies thoroughly examines the connection between narrative and claims to legal entitlement, a topic that has not, to date, been comprehensively broached in literary studies.

Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carrs bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowens novels, from James Bond to John Banvilles contemporary narratives, Allan Hepburn sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s.Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre, Intrigue emphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. Hepburn begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didions Democracy and John Barths Sabbatical.