Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror

by Joseph Crawford

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014

This book examines the connections between the growth of'terror fiction' - the genre now known as 'Gothic' - in the late eighteenthcentury, and the simultaneous appearance of the conceptual origins of'terrorism' as a category of political action. In the 1790s, Crawford argues, fourinter-connected bodies of writing arose in Britain: the historical mythology ofthe French Revolution, the political rhetoric of 'terrorism', the genre ofpolitical conspiracy theory, and the literary genre of Gothic fiction, known atthe time as 'terrorist novel writing'. All four bodies of writing drew heavilyupon one another, in order to articulate their shared sense of the radical andmonstrous otherness of the extremes of human evil, a sense which was quite newto the eighteenth century, but has remained central to the ways in which wehave thought and written about evil and violence ever since.
  • ISBN10 1472509951
  • ISBN13 9781472509956
  • Publish Date 12 September 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Imprint Bloomsbury Academic