Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
7 - The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Here is breathlessness, here is ecstasy, high and proud adventuring, patriotism, comradeship, the outwitting of the arch outwitter, the breaking of a spy – a super-head-centre of German intrigue, all in the best and most rollicking kind of good form and zest.
As this enthusiastic review from the booksellers' trade journal the Bookman suggests, the publication of Mr Standfast (1919), barely a year after the end of the First World War, was extremely well received. The anonymous critic goes on to say that it is also ‘as ingenious and thrilling a war story as any we have had’. In this respect it seems fair to assume that John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels were becoming known not for their intellectual stimulation but for good, solid entertainment. Written during the First World War, the first three of the stories which feature Richard Hannay as their hero take their readers into a world of fast-moving adventures all over the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. The Thirty-Nine Steps, set in London and Scotland, brought Buchan his first success as a writer of spy novels in 1915, and was quickly followed by the Middle Eastern adventure of Greenmantle in 1916. Of the five Richard Hannay novels, Mr Standfast is the last written under the direct influence of the War and was eventually published in 1919.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity , pp. 111 - 124Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014