The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture

The contemporary preoccupation with terrorism is marked by a curious paradox. Since the late twentieth century terrorism has been ubiquitous in public discourse while the terrorists' voice is usually silenced. Flood and Frank question if the terrorist is "the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times", as Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass have suggested. The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture takes an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Covering a broad geographical scope, it explores how media forms such as novels, fiction and non-fiction films, and comic books make sense of the terrorist. This collection asks how ideological agenda, religious identity, ethnicity, and gender impact the way the perpetrators of political violence are conceived in different historical moments and cultural contexts. Maria Flood is Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at the University of Liverpool Michael C. Frank is Professor of Literatures in English of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries at the University of Zurich