A book for people who crave digging up a forgotten, ancient codex and seeing how it reflects a lot of the things we use in our day to day life.

Cryptography, codes, and concealment shape modern narrative and subjectivity. This work moves from early modern ciphers through Enlightenment rationality to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, looking at encryption as a way of thinking about power, interpretation, and the limits of knowledge rather than as a purely mathematical practice.

Positioned at the intersection of literary criticism, intellectual history, and political theory, the study anticipates later debates about surveillance, privacy, and information culture. Its strength lies in showing how acts of hiding and decoding structure modern ideas of the self, the state, and reading itself.

Edition note: First published 1997. Academic monograph.