Forms of Empire

The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

Nathan K. Hensley

A sharply-written and provocative analysis of the role of violence in liberal modernity
Offers new readings of canonical nineteenth-century writers including George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Henry James
Draws on archival material from India, England, Canada, and the US to make a case for "literary thinking" as distinct conceptual mode
Reconsiders debates about the role of critique, the value of the humanities, and the nature of reading in light of political violence
Positions Victorian thought as resource for understanding current dilemmas of liberal empire and global governance
Will appeal to scholars in literary studies, media studies, intellectual history, political theory, philosophy, art history, and cultural theory

Forms of Empire

The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

Nathan K. Hensley

Description

Forms of Empire shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed writers to expand the capacities of literary form. The Victorian era is often imagined as an 'age of equipoise,' but the period between 1837 and 1901 included more than 200 separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? The much-vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it. But the sovereign violence hidden in the shadows of all law shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized. George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, A. C. Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, all generated new formal techniques to account for the sometimes sickening interplay between order and force in their liberal Empire. In contrast to the progressive idealism we have inherited from the Victorians, these writers moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. They sought aesthetic effects—free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the idea of literary 'character' itself—able to render thinkable the conceptual vertigoes of liberal violence. In so doing, they touched the dark core of our post-Victorian modernity. Archival work, literary analyses, and a theoretical framework that troubles the distinction between 'historicist' and 'formalist' approaches helps this book link the Victorian period to the present and articulate a forceful vision of why literary thinking matters now.

Forms of Empire

The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

Nathan K. Hensley

Forms of Empire

The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

Nathan K. Hensley

Author Information

Nathan K. Hensley, Assistant Professor of English, Georgetown University

Nathan K. Hensley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. His writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Periodicals Review, The Stanford Arcade, and other venues.

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