Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism

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, O Donghaile maps the political and aesthetic connections that bind the shilling shocker closely to modernism.