Language and the Politics of Despair in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist"

Abstract

Modem terrorism and its fictions arise almost simultaneously. Dostoyevsky's The Possessed began appearing in serial installments in January of 1871, only two years after Mikhail Bakunin's Revolution, Terrorism, and Banditry and Sergey Nechaev's Catechism of Revolution formulated the key principles of Russian terrorism; it prefigured by ten years the terrorists's most definitive act, the assassination of Czar Alexander II. As Barbara Melchiori's Terrorism in the