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This chapter inaugurates the book's historical methodology, delving into the literary and cultural history of dynamite violence as it was cultivated in the nineteenth century and into the modernist period. It argues that dynamite violence, with its connection to radicalism, its melodramatic and sensationalist appeal, and its ultimate mutation into the threat of terrorism, becomes a consummate embodiment of modernist approaches to the problem of political violence. This extensive history features discussion of historical anarchists and the public reaction to anarchism in England, of popular dynamite novels, and of works by Wilde, Zola, Chesterton, and James. The chapter culminates in an extended reading of Conrad's The Secret Agent, a novel whose approach to the material realities of dynamite violence, flirtation with melodrama, attraction to sensational events and styles, and final insinuation of a genuinely modern form of violence in the threat of the lone terrorist, make it exceptionally resonant as a reflection on violence in the modern world.

This chapter takes a look at the nationalist authors who confronted British imperialism by writing fiction that encouraged republican separatism and tried to explain the reason behind the 1881–5 bombing campaign. The first section examines the Fenian movement that engaged in a propaganda war, while the second section studies popular imperial literature. The chapter also discusses the anti-imperial dynamite novel.

This chapter discusses the ‘dynamite novels’ of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. It notes that these novels are both concerned with the relationship between political violence and late Victorian urban modernity, as well as the relationship between political violence and culture. These novels also explore the metropolitan conditions that produce and maintain terrorism. In some ways, they also address the cultural impact of terrorism upon the late Victorian imagination.

Beginning with Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a number of late nineteenth-century novels take up the question of violence against the state, a form of terror made possible by the invention and circulation of dynamite among radical groups who do not have access to full military resources. This very modern form of terror figures in novels by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Frank Harris, and others; terror is reimagined as a supernatural agency by Richard Marsh in The Beetle. In almost all of these cases, there is a non-reductive reading of terror as more than simply the attribute of the enemy other. A similar scrupulousness informs German writers who fictionalize the Baader-Meinhoff events, where radical terrorism is often understood as a response to the legacy of Nazi state terror. The career of Don DeLillo embodies a long-standing attention to the relations between writing and violence, most visibly in Mao II and Falling Man. In recent novels by others who are marginal to or critical of the white-Anglophone tradition (Brink, Rushdie, Shamsie, Hamid), terror is fully staged as a resource of the global-liberal hegemony.