ABSTRACT
In the literary scholarship cited at the end of the Introduction, and especially in studies on the cultural impact of 9/11, there is a certain tendency to take the phenomenon of “terrorism” for granted and to limit the scope of the investigation to the depiction of terrorism in fictional texts. International terrorism research is booming. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, it was already becoming increasingly difficult to keep up an overview of the field, but it was the attacks of September 11, 2001, that finally produced the explosion in publications in the most varied of disciplines that we are currently witnessing today. Already in 1885, the German anarchist Johann Most recommended revolutionaries to accompany their attacks with written communications to the people. In 2009, political scientist Ami-Jacques Rapin raised the objection that a social phenomenon can hardly be characterized on the basis of the intentions of the actors alone, independently of their actual effects.
