Romantic Terrorist on Stage: Tracing Terrorism back to Two Romantic Plays,The Cenci and The Robbers

Increasing violence and terrorism in nowadays world make us especially care about literary texts with terrorist or quasi-terrorist protagonists. However, there is a belief that producing such works and studying them could encourage acts of terror. Regardless of the concerns about literature’s probable role in mediating terrorism by presenting or/and representing terrorist protagonists, there are works that have boldly and brazenly underlined the autonomous nature of literature and its unique approach to human phenomena. These works attempt to explore and explain the acts of violence and locate their roots no matter in which corner of the forbidden lands they lie. Some of the earliest examples of such controversial works belong to the romantic tragedies whose sympathetic protagonists are paragons of revolt and rebellion.. The Cenci and The Robbers are two romantic plays that model different ways of representing terrorism. This paper attempts at detecting the ways in which these works might totally change the definition of terrorism and blur the borders set by the states at their cultural and ideological wars on terror.