Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

Is literature dangerous? By looking at a range of novels about terrorism this work raises the possibility that the writers relationship to actual politics may be considerably reduced in the age of television and the Internet. Margaret Scanlan traces the figure of the writer as rival or double of the terrorist from its origins in the romantic conviction of the writers originality and power through a century of political social and technological developments that undermine that belief. She argues that serious writers like Friedrich Durrenmatt Doris Lessing and Don DeLillo imagine a contemporary writers encounter with terrorists as a test of the old alliance between writer and revolutionary. After considering the possibility that televised terrorism is replacing the novel or that writing as contemporary theory would have it is itself a form of violence Scanlan asks whether the revolutionary impulse itself is dying - in politics as much as in literature. Her analyses take the reader on an exploration of the relationship between actual bombs and stories about bombings from the modern world to its electronic representation and from the exercise of political power to the fiction writers power in the world.