“Parliament is Burning”: Dynamite, Terrorism and the English Novel

Dynamite novels, ranging from best-selling works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter (1885) to Joseph Conrad’s modernist examination of the disruptive politics of anarchism in The Secret Agent (1907) reveal that terrorism was a staple feature of popular and avant-garde writing of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Tales featuring exploding newspaper stalls, bombs concealed inside books and even aerial assaults on London led by German revolutionaries and Irish Fenians fed a widespread demand for literature that was predicated on the political shocks of terrorism. A new type of literary romance that emerged in response to the Fenian bombing campaign of the 1880s, the dynamite novel was an important genre that exploited contemporary crises that fascinated the popular imagination, surviving the immediate period these events and lasting well into the 1900s. Generically, it exploited Irish republican attacks on the imperial metropolis of London but, politically, it served both imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism, with authors ranging from the self-confessed unionist, Robert Louis Stevenson, to Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the Irishman who directed the bombing campaign following his release from imprisonment. While such authors were, ideologically opposed to one-another, they shared a commitment to the aestheticisation of political violence, and in transmitting the terror-effect of actual attacks to the imaginations of readers of literary and popular fiction, their novels connected the political excitement that was generated by the Fenian bombing campaign to the oncoming literary innovations of modernism

Constructing Connections: Fiction, Art and Life (2017)

Constructing connections: Fiction, Art and Life was a series of art works and public events held in Croxteth Hall. This research was based on an interrogation of Tressell’s 1914 seminal socialist tract, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It investigated and made parallels with current societal inequalities and of the historical period as described in text. MacKinnon-Day engaged daily with the staff and volunteers at Croxteth Hall during this residency. This interaction was a key onsite catalyst for her research and was disseminated through subsequent a blog, seminars, community engagement, exhibitions and a publication. This interrogation of place as seen, through the lens of Tressell’s text, formed the basis from which further academic discussion took place at the Centre for Literature and Cultural History at LJMU. The project extended Mackinnon-Day’s previous research enquiry: An Artist's Anthropological Approach to Sustainability. This was published in The International Journal of Art and Design October 2016. The works produced are now incrementally integrated into the Hall’s permanent public displays. On completion of the exhibition, the imagery and text were circulated nationally in a ‘newspaper’ publication with essays offering a critical review of the exhibition from Tessa Jackson OBE and academic Dr Deaglan O’Donghaile. The onsite research created ideas for artworks in a place where contemporary art is not normally practiced or seen. It extended the contemporary discourse e.g. Lucy Lippard’s idea of ‘weaving lived experiences’ within the ‘subject of place’ The Lure of the Local (1998) and Paul Virilio's study of the ‘infra-ordinary’ The Everyday, Johnston (2008) about bringing the uneventful and overlooked aspects of lived experience into visibility. As planned, the artworks subverted the nostalgic narrative of Edwardian life portrayed in the permanent exhibits and promoted contemporary relevance. The resultant exhibition, blog, schools and public engagement expanded the themes and ideas of the project identified through a series of installations developed in response to the text and site

Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

This essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.” © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Grou

The imagination of urban chaos : representations of terrorism in late Victorian and modernist literature

THESIS 7726Modern terrorism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, when outbreaks of apparently sporadic violence by nihilists, Irish republicans and anarchists changed the way in which the public viewed the issue of political subversion. Russian nihilists opened the age of terrorism with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, who was killed by a bomb in St Petersburg in 1881, and shortly afterward Britain was terrorized by Irish republican terrorism when, from 1883-1885, Clan na Gael launched its brief but spectacular dynamite campaign by setting off a series of explosions in several cities. This outbreak was soon followed by the political violence and revolutionary rhetoric of the anarchists, whose ?propaganda-by-deed? continued up until the end of the 1890s. The political atmosphere of this period was also expressed in literature - in popular novels, in the anarchists? own journalism and, finally, in the pages of the modernist journal, BLAST. This thesis examines the literature, published during the late Victorian and early Modernist periods, that explored the issue of political violence: its presence was felt in popular novels, journalism and literary modernism, introducing to literature the character of the modern terrorist, who became an emblematic figure of fin de siecle