Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism - Paperback

by Deaglán Ó. Donghaile (Author)

Dynamite novels meet highbrow modernism via the impact of terrorism. Between 1880 and 1915, a range of writers exploited terrorism's political shocks for their own artistic ends. Drawing on late-Victorian 'dynamite novels' by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom Greer and Robert Thynne, radical journals and papers, such as The Irish People, The Torch, Anarchy and Freiheit, and modernist writing from H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad to the compulsively militant modernism of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, Ó Donghaile maps the political and aesthetic connections that bind the shilling shocker closely to modernism.

Back Jacket

ENDORSEMENTS BEING SOUGHT Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century's literature and culture. Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile By connecting Fenian and anarchist violence found in popular fiction from the 1880s to the early 1900s with the avant-garde writing of British modernism, Deaglán Ó Donghaile demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and modernism were directly influenced by the explosive shocks of late nineteenth-century terrorism. For the first time, late-Victorian 'dynamite novels', radical journalism and modernist writing are brought together in provocative readings of Henry James, R L Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Wyndham Lewis. Deaglán Ó Donghaile lectures in nineteenth-century literature at Liverpool Hope University.

Author Biography

Deaglán Ó Donghaile is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University.