Literary Rendition of Terrorism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to look at the treatment of terrorism in two novels of two different time periods-Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,(1907) which belongs to the colonial period and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, (2006), which belongs to the postcolonial period. The basic thing of both the novels is the debunking of terrorism, and the core gist of the both novelists is that the scourge of terrorism will continue as long as hatred, revenge, ideology and fanaticism are out of control in the society. Even while criticizing terrorism, the novelists also see terrorism as an ultimate means to fight against injustice.The clue to this dissertation’s idea comes from Alex Houen’s article “The Secret Agent: Anarchism and the Thermodynamics of Law” (1998). My work marks a departure from that of Houen’s position, in that it focuses on what it claims as “literary rendition”: Conrad’s representation of the threat of terrorism to London by the Irish Publicans and the Indian nationalists. Houen more concentrates on how terrorism was tied to the question of Englishness during the first decade of the twentieth century, particularly in the wake of the first terrorist bomb attack on London carried out by the Irish Republicans. As far as the matter of assumptions and chapter divisions is concerned, the first chapter consists of the brief introduction of the term “terrorism”, a short introduction of the novelists and the novels and also the review of literature of the two novels. The second chapter contains the analysis of The Secret Agent and the third chapter consists of the analysis of Shalimar the Clown with the perspective of literary rendition. Chapter four concludes the dissertation, identifies the purpose of both Conrad and Rushdie in taking up the subject of terrorism as giving an insight into the compelling reasons for the rise of terrorism.