Forms of Empire
The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty
Nathan K. Hensley
Reviews and Awards
"forms of Empire's attention to the violence that lies at the heart of liberalism is an important intervention and has the capacity to significantly reshape the field and, in particular, studies of liberalism." -- Zarena Aslami, Michigan State University, Victorian Literature and Culture
"Hensley presents a powerful intellect and a lucid voice on the scholarly scene." -- Regenia Gagnier , Novel: A Forum on Fiction
"The forms of Nathan Hensley's Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty are not just sociopolitical but also literary constructs, and it is Hensley's use of form to forge connections between literature and liberal law that is the most striking feature of this book ... Original in its method, Forms of Empire also provides striking and original readings of the texts it treats." -- Andrea Henderson, Studies in English Literature
"A masterful and beautifully written book of commanding scope, Hensley's Forms of Empire posits a new method of reading the Victorian period's, and more broadly liberalism's, 'constitutive antinomy: the intimate, scandalous intertwinement of violence and law.'"-Maeve Adams, V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century
"Stunningly smart and erudite, Forms of Empire convincingly argues that violence necessarily constitutes the other face of liberal modernity. Not only does Nathan Hensley probe the very logic of empire, but, in so doing, he also proffers an incisive meditation on contemporary habits and assumptions of literary criticism. That the book pulls these different threads together with rigor as well as elegance is but one example of its brilliance. Forms of Empire is a spectacular achievement." --Sukanya Banerjee, author of Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire
"Well written, bracingly argued, replete with insights, the book is a significant achievement." --James Buzard, Journal of British Studies
"Hensley manages to keep multiple strains of thought going simultaneously, such that reading Forms of Empire is like listening to music on a dozen different channels. Hardly any other critic can achieve such an ambitiously impressive stereophonic analysis." --Talia Schaffer, author of Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction
"The book is filled with rich, illuminating writing, informed equally by rigorous archival research and sensitive close readings. At a larger conceptual level, however, Hensley has made an important modification to a critical assumption that has been operable since the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981 ... [For Hensley,] literary texts do not resolve the ideological contradiction between peace and violence. Rather, they participate in the dynamic of disclosure and repression that makes the liberal paradox a persistent possibility." --Zach Fruit, V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century
"While Forms of Empire's most obvious contribution to the field is its utterly convincing picture of the indelible relationship between empire and Victorian literature, and between violence and liberalism, the book's dedication to keeping the fraught histories and persistent blindspots of our methodologies in view is an important part of the way it intervenes in the liberal triumphalism that is, too often, our unacknowledged Victorian inheritance." --Tanya Agathocleous, V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century
"The effect of [Forms of Empire's] specificity is bracing. Despite Hensley's substantial citing of different critics and theorists of politics and aesthetics, he constructs a coherent argument throughout the book, partly because his critical intimacy with the texts he examines is sustained, impeccably close, and enviably versatile." --Nasser Mufti, Review 19
"A gripping, at times formidable, study that consistently and inventively gauges the depth to which in Victorian Britain the liberal state (of mind, of nationhood) was infused by its reprobated and ostensibly superseded opposite: the infliction of brutal violence on subjected bodies around the imperial globe ... This book is going to get noticed." --Herbert Tucker, John C. Coleman Professor of English, University of Virginia, author of Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910