Adrian S. Wisnicki. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel. New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 978-0415955607. Price: US$110

Our particular moment in history has been witness to a good deal of conspiracy theorizing. Nearly all of us have seen, read, and even speculated about the theories surrounding John F. Kennedy and the wave of political assassinations in the 1960s. More recently, of course, we’ve been privy to countless theories concerning terrorist conspiracies, government conspiracies, and corporate conspiracies. Perhaps, during the various salvos of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror,” it might even make sense for us all to imagine that conspiracies do abound throughout our community, our country’s administration, and our globe. After all, we have grown quite accustomed to the assorted terms and expressions that accompany and inspire conspiracy theorists. In fact, when we encounter statements on the evening news that regularly include claims such as “the F.B.I. has determined that the suspect acted alone,” or “the suspect has committed suicide” as we have recently regarding the 2001 Anthrax postal scare, it almost feels natural to be suspicious, to imagine that some vast and nefarious network of multi-national corporations and government operatives moves behind the scenes to defraud and subdue an unwitting populace. Adrian Wisnicki’s thoroughly researched and reflective study of the evolution of conspiracy theory fiction, which traces the genre from its birth-pangs in early detective stories through its fully self-aware modernist realization in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and into the paranoid, recursive style of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, engages with the peculiar and obsessive feelings of distrust and fear that seem to have infected so many of the citizens of our contemporary world. Conspiracies certainly aren’t the particular province of modernity, of course, and Wisnicki is quick to distinguish between what he calls traditional “conspiracy narratives” (like those we see in Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Julius Caesar) and “conspiracy theory narratives,” which turn on the “conspiracy-centered ‘paranoia’ of their protagonists” (2). Tracing this distinctly modern literary phenomenon back to its ground zero in Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin stories; through Victorian novels such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White; and into the early modernist writings of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, G.K. Chesterton, and Proust, the study provides a series of tightly constructed and judiciously crafted close readings that detail precisely how the basic story of detection developed into the full-blown paranoid fiction of a Pynchon, Franz Kafka, or Jorge Luis Borges. Wisnicki begins, however, by describing what he refers to as the key “conspiricemes” of the Anglo-American and European novelistic traditions. Following Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, which breaks language down into phonemes (the smallest particles of distinctive sound meaning) and morphemes (the smallest units to contain semantic meaning), Wisnicki’s fundamentally structuralist approach works to isolate the central components, the conspiricemes, of the conspiracy theory narrative. Wisnicki describes these conspiricemes through his often shrewd readings, and, eventually, he examines the several ways that they were sewn together by the fiction writers of the early twentieth century. The conspiricemes enumerated in the study include “The Subject Who Knows” (e.g., Auguste Dupin), “The Subject Who Tries to Know (e.g., Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone), “The Hidden Hand Conspiracy” (e.g., the Magwitch narrative in Great Expectations), “The Conspiracy to Defraud” (e.g., Fosco and Glyde in Woman in White), “The Paranoid Subject,” (Walter Hartright in The Woman in White), “The Inaccessible Authorities,” (in Brontë’s Villete and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish), “Revolutionary Fiction” (the anarchists in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes), “Early-Modernist Espionage” (Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday), and “The …