This volume brings together academics from the USA and across Europe to examine the nature, representations and perceptions of the figure of the spy in Europe between 1815 and 1914. As such, it is the first scholarly investigation of the genesis both of contemporary espionage and of the cultural imagination associated with it.

Spies in European Culture, 1815-1914 sheds light on the founding moment of espionage and the use of secrecy in politics in the contemporary age. It successfully argues that the 19th century saw the development of a cultural-historical process in which disruptive novelties like the disguise, the secret and the double identity simultaneously assailed the spheres of the state, the self and the imaginary, ushering in distinctive features of society in the modern era in the process. This global phenomenon, in which state and society, but also reality and fiction, were profoundly intertwined, is therefore investigated by means of a transdisciplinary analysis that considers both the politico-institutional and the cultural planes that existed at the time.

Elisabetta Abignente is Researcher in Comparative Literatures at University of Naples Federico II, Italy. She is the author of three books and one edited volume in Italian.

Laura Di Fiore is Associate Professor in History of Political Institutions at University of Naples Federico II, Italy. She is author of three books in Italian, including Gli Invisibili. Polizia politica e agenti segreti nell'Ottocento borbonico (2018).