Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Genres
Chapter 1: The King of Secret Readers
Chapter 2: Secret Writing as Alchemy: Recoding Defoe
Chapter 3: Detective Fiction and the Analytic Sublime
Chapter 4: Dark Fiber: Cryptography, Telegraphy, Science Fiction
Part 2: Effects
Chapter 5: Resurrexi: Poe in the Crypt of Lizzie Doten
Chapter 6: Deciphering the Cold War: Toward a Literary History of Espionage
Chapter 7: Ciphering the Net
Coda: Strange Loops and Talking Birds
Appendix: Public-Key Cryptography
Notes
Glossary
Index

About the Author

Shawn Rosenheim is associate professor of English and American Studies at Williams College.

Reviews

"A masterful and imaginative work which is truly Poe-like in its fascination with cryptography, ciphers, and codes. Poe takes his place as the first postmodern thinker, a precursor of such figures as Pynchon, Borges, and William Gibson."--Errol Morris, director of 'The Thin Blue Line' and 'A Brief History of Time' "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production--the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding--that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics--the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."--Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College