The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. Thus, we might ask, as determinism corroded and as Darwinist, thermodynamic, and statistical modes of thinking embraced chance and probability, how narrative plot also became contingent, probabilistic, and given to uncertainty and risk or, further, how narrative fiction can serve as a barometer of late-nineteenth-century risk society, if not itself a form of resilience in the face of that society. At the same time, as James and Conrad multiply, bewilder – if not dissolve – narrative ‘plot,’ they allow us to rethink plot itself at a formal or meta-fictional level. This movement allows James and Conrad to diagnose the political affects of late Victorian liberal ideology in often surprising ways, including how these ideologies pre-conditioned a negative response to anarchism – as terroristic, as a foreign contagion, if not as a form of evil – and sought to confine anarchism within its disciplinary apparatuses. In each novel, risk becomes manifest as a movement between the macro-political and the micro-political: revolutionary anarchist plots and the police actions taken to uncover and neutralize them often become indistinguishable from the novels’ ‘love plots’ and domestic dramas. Oxford: Oxford University Press) participate in the emergence of systemic risk around the turn of the twentieth century, in terms of their extended dramatizations of revolutionary violence and anarchism. London: Everyman's Library) and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (2004. This article explores how two novels, Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1991.
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