Christopher Sutch
Sep 21, 2014
Christopher Sutch rated it liked it
This overview of cult/conspiracy literature from the ancient Greeks to 2009 fills in some gaps in American scholarship in this area, but also has its problems. Here's what I think Ziolkowski does right: he gives prominence to the German bundroman, an area that a lot of literary scholars in America likely know little or nothing about (I didn't, anyway), and he shows how important that genre was in developing the contemporary conspiracy thriller (even though he buries his most important scholarly contributions in the footnotes, so readers who don't turn to the back of the book won't actually know the significance of the author's scholarship). _However_... the vast majority of this text really consists of summaries of the works Ziolkowski is supposedly examining with little or no theoretical insight. Even his "argument" (which he makes reference to continuously) is really just an observation about the content of the works he is reading, and not anything particularly profound or theoretically valuable, which makes this book suffer as a piece of scholarship. So this work serves as a good sourcebook for the history of the novel of conspiracy, but doesn't give real insight into the genre or why (some of us) enjoy reading it.