A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Garber, Marjorie
A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Garber, Marjorie

A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare

A world-renowned critic's haunting and deeply researched account of the subversive acts of literary revenge performed during...
$47.37 USD
$89.99 USD
$47.37 USD
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Author: Marjorie Garber
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $47.37
A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Garber, Marjorie

A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare

$89.99 $47.37
A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Garber, Marjorie

A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare

$89.99 $47.37
Author: Marjorie Garber
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

A world-renowned critic's haunting and deeply researched account of the subversive acts of literary revenge performed during the Red Scare hearings of the 1950s

In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted actors, directors, singers, filmmakers, writers, and prominent scientists, accusing them of disloyalty, subversion, and treason against the United States of America. HUAC and McCarthyism ruined careers and lives. But something striking also happened during the hearings: the poems, plays, novels, and song lyrics cited in the witness testimony spoke back, offering uncanny counter-testimonies and remarkable acts of "poetic revenge."

This book is an urgent, probing exploration of the HUAC, its attempts to bowdlerize and contort facts, and the voices that rose out of history to oppose and subsume it. Marjorie Garber shows how writers versed in the literary tropes of revenge appear in the hearings: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bellamy, and others. But the agent of revenge is not the author of the work; it is the work itself, with all its cultural power and relevance, spanning years or centuries.

In narrating the destructive history of the Red Scare, Garber powerfully illuminates the constructive force of literature in opposing political oppression.



Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 03/24/2026
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.73h x 5.84w x 0.93d
ISBN: 9780300282825


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2026
Publishers Weekly 01/19/2026

About the Author
Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Research Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of twenty books, including Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. She lives in London, UK.
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