As Vanessa R. Schwartz has suggested, overt sensationalising and spectacularising provided the means by which experience was commodified in late nineteenth-century popular culture. As we have seen with the dynamite novel, Fenian and anarchist politics were marketed as popular literary spectacles, with revolutionary violence being presented to readers in the guise of popular forms such as detective fiction, imperial quest adventures and science fantasy. While Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent bridged the void separating the various types of dynamite novel of the 1880s and 1890s from literary modernism, Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist movement adopted political violence as the basis of its avant-garde modernist practice. Vorticism brought literary shock to a new aesthetic level in its journal, Blast, in which the individualist politics of anarchism were fused with an ‘exploding’ oppositional ideology of art. Vorticism's deliberately agitational style, which Lewis engineered with the help of Ezra Pound to appear as a subversive literary and artistic ‘fashion’, was intended to shock the sensibilities of the bourgeois public that it was aimed at; paradoxically, Lewis hoped that the influential circles targeted in Blast would ultimately become its sponsors. With its stress on the importance of the individual, the journal shared its anarchic leanings with Richard Aldington's more mainstream modernist journal, The Egoist, which stressed the need to examine the workings of the individual ‘nervous system’, as opposed to the collective imperatives being advocated by Fabian socialism.