Terrorism and Literature

Description

Terrorism has long been a major shaping force in the world. However, the meanings of terrorism, as a word and as a set of actions, are intensely contested. This volume explores how literature has dealt with terrorism from the Renaissance to today, inviting the reader to make connections between older instances of terrorism and contemporary ones, and to see how the various literary treatments of terrorism draw on each other. The essays demonstrate that the debates around terrorism only give the fictive imagination more room, and that fiction has a great deal to offer in terms of both understanding terrorism and our responses to it. Written by historians and literary critics, the essays provide essential knowledge to understand terrorism in its full complexity. As befitting a global problem, this book brings together a truly international group of scholars, with representatives from America, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, and other countries.

Peter C. Herman is Professor of English Literature at San Diego State University. His most recent publications are A Short History of Early Modern England: British Literature in Context (2011), Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (2010), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge, 2012), and Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (2005).