Genres of Conspiracy in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

This chapter focuses on British literature and how the threat of conspiracy, imagined in popular fiction, depended on an idea of nationhood that was opposed by plots that threatened it from beyond its borders or by enemies at home, who served other interests and political programmes. The transmission of conspiracy narratives required a developed and orderly system of print publication, whose success depended on recognition of these narrative conventions in their niches of the popular press. The conspiracy theory consistently calls for measures to be taken in the present to counteract forces that, while latent, threaten the immediate future of the social order – or, in the case of invasion fiction, the nation-state. The print context of invasion fiction is underexamined and informs the transmission of the genre as well as its relation to the idea of conspiracy. Conspiracy articulated the figures of invasion and network and attached itself to contemporary practices of writing.