Webster' Third International Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the 20 dictionaries listed in the "One Look" dictionaries at http://www.onelook.com/ all agree that "Complicity" means "involvement with another in doing something illegal or wrong", or variations on that same sense of involvement in wrong or illegal activity. OED calls it "The being an accomplice; partnership in an evil action." As you have indicated, the older meaning included "State of being complex or involved; = COMPLEXITY", with OED quotations: "1847 CRAIG, Complicity, complexity; state of being involved. 1856 EMERSON Eng. Traits, Ability Wks. (Bohn) II. 36 In all the complicity and delay incident to the several series of means they employ. 1888 Jrnl. Education Jan. 31 Carrying it on..with increasing complicity and energy according to the increasing age of his pupils."

Possible variant shades of meaning are available in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory, which gets 15 hits for the word Complicity, most of which are many paragraphs long and so would give you some context for the word's use in those texts. For example the first one, Brown, Nicholas. Aesthetics (Second Edition 2005), says: "The reconciliation that is the source of aesthetic pleasure disguises a complicity with the social life it rebukes."

Similarly, Fogarty, Anne. Irish Theory and Criticism (Second Edition 2005), says: "In Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (1998)Eagleton similarly outlines the hidden complicity between Irish revisionists and postmodernists in order to argue for the bankruptcy of this form of historical analysis"

Because of stict license agreements, I cannot copy these to send all of them to you, but if you are near a large university library, they may well have it available for use on site. Maybe far more accessible is Literature Resource Center, a database that is at many public libraries (because of its usefulness for high school as well as college students). The word Complicity gets 452 hits as a Keyword search. As a title word it gets 19 hits. But from a quick look at some of the full text records (using CTRL-F to find complexity), I see that most are using it in its more official "guilt" sense. I think your best bet will be an academic library, either using that Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory, or MLA International Bibliography, which will at least get you cited references to articles that you can then look for in online journals or books in those libraries. MLA Bibliography gets 157 hits in the default fields (title, subjects, and abstracts). Many of those of course use complicity in connection with evil, but some appear to use it in a less drastic sense - maybe the complicity of one school of thought or tradition with another that it would be expected to oppose.

Thanks,

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu