Scanlan (English, Indiana University South Bend) considers several novels about terrorists and considers what they say about the role of the writer in modern society and politics. She examines the figure of the writer as a rival or a mirror of the terrorist, tracing the development of this relationship from its Romantic origins to the age of the Unabomber. The works of DeLillo, Rushdie, McNamee, Mary McCarthy, Lessing, Coetzee, Durrenmatt, Roth, Robert Stone, Volodine, and Conrad are specifically considered. c. Book News Inc.

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.

The years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen the publication of a wide range of scientific analyses of terrorism. Literary studies seem to lag curiously behind this general shift of academic interest. The present volume sets out to fill this gap. It does so in the conviction that the study of literature has much to offer to the transdisciplinary investigation of terror, not only with respect to the present post-9/11 situation but also with respect to earlier historical contexts. Literary texts are media of cultural self-reflection, and as such they have always played a crucial role in the discursive response to terror, both contributing to and resisting dominant conceptions of the causes, motivations, dynamics, and aftermath of terrorist violence. By bringing together experts from various fields and by combining case studies of works from diverse periods and national literatures, the volume Literature and Terrorism chooses a diachronic and comparative perspective. It is interested in the specific cultural work performed by narrative and dramatic literature in the face of terrorism, focusing on literature's ambivalent relationship to other, competing modes of discourse.

First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.

Discussing the challenges terrorist groups face as they multiply and plot international attacks, while at the same time providing a framework for decoding the strengths and weaknesses of their counter-intelligence, Blake W. Mobley offers an indispensable text for the intelligence, military, homeland security, and law enforcement fields.

A fundamentally new interpretation of the emergence of modern terrorism, arguing that it formed in the Russian literary imagination well before any shot was fired or bomb exploded.

Revised and reissued in light of recent events, this classic and now increasingly important book is an exception in the literature on terrorism. Based on complex observations of actual movement participants, Wieviorka's book addresses a broad spectrum of terrorist activity—from Italian left-wing terrorists to Basque nationalist groups to the international terrorism of Palestine and the Middle East. The result is an incisive analysis of what terrorists believe and what they hope to achieve through their actions. For this new edition, Wieviorka adds new material that remaps the state of terrorism after the events of 2001.