Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism by Deaglán Ó Donghaile (review)

Of all the great divides that have shaped literary criticism, perhaps none is so intransigent as the one separating Victorian from modernist studies. Despite several decades of work which has queried, defied, or simply ignored the old periodizations, a concerted effort among scholars to question and historicize modernism’s formulations about its exceptionalism, and a pervasive sense that literary and historical boundaries cannot withstand the pressures ushered in by transnational and global perspectives, there remains something genuinely surprising about work that makes a strong case for continuity, rather than breakage, across the century’s turn. As its title suggests, Deaglán Ó Donghaile’s study, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism, stakes its claim on this kind of assessment of the persistence of cultural forms from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, in this case in the resonance of dynamite explosion and the appeal of sensational political violence as a subject for fiction. Blasted Literature illuminates a fascinating and underappreciated chapter in cultural history, when the idea of the exploding bomb came to organize a sweep of radical political activism, conservative panic, and all manner of fiction, in a historical sequence that spans from the late 1860s through to the First World War. It should be said, at the outset, that the “modernism” of the book’s title is a fairly circumscribed one, which might not speak to all modernist scholars, abiding primarily in the book’s culminating chapter on Wyndham Lewis, whose short-lived manifesto BLAST (1914–15) makes to perfection Ó Donghaile’s argument about the ongoing attraction of late nineteenthcentury radical thought and the fetishization of explosion in modernism (readings of several modernist novels are also integrated into chapters examining urban spaces, anarchist writings, and imperialism). What is at stake is less an expansive account either of modernism or of Victorian literature than an assessment of the resonance of the bomb as a major feature of imaginative life across a half century.

Blasted Literature makes this case with gusto. Its argument is that terrorist bombs, from the moment they arrived in England and Ireland, courtesy of anarchist and Fenian insurgents, became an integral feature of popular as well as elite literature, and as such provided a thematic underpinning for much that was sensational and shock-oriented in works of the period. The appeal of dynamite as a magnetic center around which plots and characters revolve went unabated, Ó Donghaile argues, driven in large part by market forces (these market forces are at times assumed in this study, based on the fact that dynamite-themed writing was continually produced, and at other times analyzed, as in the very interesting discussion of several bizarre advertising schemes). Ó Donghaile is adamant about what he calls the “entertainment value” of terrorist themes, writing that “many late Victorian readers found having their ‘nerves’, or political-conceptual faculties, shattered a very thrilling experience, as proven by their eager consumption of popular narratives of revolutionary violence. … Fenian bombs entertained as much as they terrified and appealed to sensation-hungry readers of penny dreadfuls and popular magazines” (3). One aspect of this appeal, Ó Donghaile’s study suggests, is that it is politically elastic, with dynamite novels ranging widely in their support or condemnation of radical causes. Thus what might seem a passing infatuation of popular writers—the excesses and intrigues of plots against the city, public officials, and the public itself; the effects of dynamite when it explodes—in fact cut across the culture and eventually found a home in one strand of modernism: Vorticism’s brash and aggressive challenge to bourgeois values of liberalism and complacency. It seems unquestionably right that the bomb entered the gritty life of urban modernity in this period, and to account for the role literature played in this major turn of consciousness is significant. Nevertheless, claims about the “thrill” of dynamite literature, or easy elisions of the meaning of “explosion,” made repeatedly...