The Covert Sphere

Examining how since 1947 a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture.

"His study impressively documents how state secrecy became a privileged topos for reflecting on power and knowledge in late twentieth century American literature and cutlure." —Alexander Dunst,Journal of American Studies

In his exploration of the national security state and the fiction it inspires, Melley engages in a spirited and cerebral examination of certain cultural and political tropes of the Cold Warand beyond, illustrating how often they have been rearticulated in a twenty-first-centurycontext as the War on Terror gathered pace in the wake of 9/11.

Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America , also from Cornell.