The Dynamite Novel and The Secret Agent

Abstract

Conrad wrote The Secret Agent noting that his mind ran much on “popularity,” and he joins a crowd of other novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who write on the subject. In a review of the various kinds of anarchist fiction—the dynamite novels of the age—various key elements of the genre are examined with particular examples from some of the notable successes and failures of the genre. In particular, an examination of the role of the émigré Pole is considered for its implications in Conrad’s own foray into the popular novel.