Conspiracy, Revolution and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel

Drawing on critical work by D.A. Miller, Joseph Allen Boone, Michel Foucault, and others, as well as on cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian "conspiracy narrative tradition"-a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House , Great Expectations , Villette , and The Moonstone , as well as later Victorian and Edwardian novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton, and early spy thrillers such as The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps . In reading these works as instances of a single literary tradition, the conspiracy narrative tradition, the author traces how the representation of conspiracy changes in nineteenth-century British literature and argue that many of these changes occur in response to significant Victorian-era developments, reading literary works by Charlotte Brontë, Trollope, Dickens, Stoker, and many others in relation to historical phenomena like the European revolutions of 1848-49, the rise of British law enforcement agencies, the growth of Irish Fenian terrorism, and the fin-de-siécle waning of the British Empire. Ultimately, the author suggests that these literary works engage (and grow out of) larger cultural debates on surveillance and privacy, British political asylum practices and the presence of foreign revolutionaries in England, and the possibility of invasion by European powers like Germany and France.Wisnicki, Adrian S. is the author of 'Conspiracy, Revolution and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415955607 and ISBN 0415955602.