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

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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.

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This is a substantial study containing a wealth of close analysis of Gothic texts within the framework of the authors focus. * The Year's Work in English Studies *
An important scholarly work that accurately re-evaluates the relationship between gothic fiction and the French Revolution through the rhetoric of terror that they both share. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism might be another of the many critical works already published on the gothic, but it is of the highest quality and will likely prove to be a seminal text in the study of the gothic for many years to come. -- Joel T. Terranova * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *

Author Bio

Joseph Crawford is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK.