Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty

In Forms of Empire, Nathan K. Hensley 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 two hundred separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? Forms of Empire unpacks the seeming paradoxes of the Pax Britannica's endless conflict, showing that the much vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it. But the violence hidden in the shadows of all law --the violence of sovereign power itself--shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized. This book follows some of the nineteenth century's most astute literary thinkers--George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, A.C. Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson among them--as they wrestled with the sometimes sickening interplay between order and force, and generated new formal techniques to account for fact that an Empire built on freedom had death coiled at its very heart. In contrast to the progressive idealism we have inherited from the Victorians, the writers at the core of Forms of Empire moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. Instead they sought effects--free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the idea of literary "character" itself--that might render thinkable the conceptual vertigoes of liberal violence. In the process, they touched up to the dark core of our post-Victorian modernity. Drawing on archival work, literary analyses, and a theoretical framework that troubles the distinction between "historicist" and "formalist" approaches, Forms of Empire links the Victorian period to the present and articulates a forceful vision of why literary thinking matters now.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Reading Endless War I: Equipoise 1: Time and Violence in the Age of Equipoise 2: Reform Fiction's Logic of Belonging II: And Elsewhere 3: Form and Excess, Morant Bay and Swinburne 4: The Philosophy of Romance Form Conclusion. Endless War Then and Now Works Cited

About the Author :
Nathan K. Hensley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he also co-directs the Modernities Working Group. His writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Periodicals Review, The Stanford Arcade, and other venues.

Review :
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. Hensley presents a powerful intellect and a lucid voice on the scholarly scene. 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. 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. 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 books 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. Well written, bracingly argued, replete with insights, the book is a significant achievement. 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. ... Now Lauren Goodlad and Nathan Hensley offer two new ways of understanding Victorian society's commitment to expansion, conquest, and domination, and Victorian literature's commitment to staying at home ... specialists in the Victorian era -- like Goodlad and Hensley -- have shown us a great deal about the way its literature reflects upon imperialism without ever going to the colonies. A masterful and beautifully written book of commanding scope, Hensleys Forms of Empire posits a new method of reading the Victorian periods, and more broadly liberalisms, constitutive antimony: the intimate, scandalous intertwinement of violence and law (9) 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. Forms of Empire is gratifying in its determination to put not only empire but the violence upon which it depends at the center of Victorian literature and the critical project of Victorian studies The book is filled with rich, illuminating writing, informed equally by rigorous archival research and sensitive close readings ... Hensleys innovative contribution is a deft amalgam of surface-oriented close reading, sensitive to the present while grounded in history