Treatment of Terrorism in Conrad's The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes

Abstract

Joseph Conrad ironizes and reduces the anarchists/terrorists and represents the ironic butt as being contaminated in both the novels The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Conrad deflates the anarchists/terrorists along with their agents and provocateurs. He marginalizes the Russians and Russia as a whole and the Orientals, in other words, and centers the Westerners in Under Western Eyes. This dissertation assesses such reduction in the light of the nexus between his superior ironic position and colonial project against anarchism/terrorism that had threatened the very centre of the British colonial rule – London. It throws light on such marginalized issues with contrapuntal reading.