Since 1970, terrorism has become a prominent subject for English-language novels. In an attempt to characterize the modern terrorism novel and the cultural work it has performed, the authors have devised a typology of terrorism-infiction from 1970 through 2001. Over a thousand novels were documented, including both thrillers and mainstream works. A sample of twenty-five novels from the period was then selected for careful reading, analysis, and comparison. Preliminary results establish that though there is a great deal of diversity in terrorism novels, both in what they do with terrorism and why, they are by and large focused less on politics than on sentiment and less on the perpetrators of terrorism than on its victims. But novels introduce an innovation in what has been called the “mythography of terrorism” by introducing new types of “controlling consciousnesses” through which terrorist violence is perceived.

No abstract

No abstract

Hundreds of writers in the English-speaking world of the seventeenth-century imagined alternative ideal societies. Sometimes they did so by exploring fanciful territories, such as the world in the moon or the nations of the Antipodes; but sometimes they composed serious disquisitions about the here and now, proposing how England or its nascent colonies could be conceived of as an 'Oceana,' or a New Jerusalem. First published in 2002, this book provides a comprehensive view of the operations of the utopian imagination in literature from 1603 to the 1660s. Appealing to social theorists, literary critics, and political and cultural historians, this volume revises prevailing notions of the languages of hope and social dreaming in the making of British modernity during a century of political and intellectual upheaval.

No abstract