VOL. 53, BOOK 1, PART В, 2015, pp. 16 – 29 Full text (Bg)

Author: Plamen Antov

Affiliation: Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The paper considers some specific trends in the spy subgenre of crime fiction during the 1960s in the wide context of all the changes after the April plenum (1956) – literary, ideological, sociocultural, socio-mental, and business. The flourishing state of international tourism at the Black Sea has been used as a key. The thriving of this genre is thus perceived as an opening through which a new urban cosmopolitan sensuality bursts into literature; it further spreads around higher and more central zones of fiction. The subject is examined not only on a trivial, ideological level, but in the deeper perspective of the sphere of national ideology: how the genre of crime fiction operates with regard to the „symbolic capital“ of a National Revival.

Key words: urbanism, cosmopolitanism; civilization–primitive; authenticity–kitsch; political and national ideology