Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-296) and index.
Contents:
Radically Both: Stevenson's Strange Case. Mutiny All But Universal -- From Reflection to Mediation -- Unburial Grounds -- Equipoise and Elsewhere -- 4. EQUIPOISE -- 1. Time and Violence in the Age of Equipoise -- Geological Liberalism and Slow Time -- Countryside Gradualism: The Mill on the Floss I -- Liberal Time c. 1859: Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill -- Countryside Catastrophism: The Mill on the Floss II -- On Naive and Sentimental Novels: Schiller and the Pleasures of the Past -- 2. Reform Fiction's Logic of Belonging -- Becoming General: The Census -- A Rule of Equations/Mill's Logic -- "Count of Heads": Inductive Democracy -- Torn from the List of the Living: The Woman in White -- Armadale and the Character of Reform -- Cliche as Form: "The civilized universe knows it already" -- Becoming Singular: Dickens' Ejecta -- pt. II AND ELSEWHERE -- 3. Form and Excess, Morant Bay and Swinburne -- The Language Circumstances Require: Two Instances -- Ballads of Life and Death -- "Licking at the police": The Jamaica Rebellion -- "Superflux of pain": Poems and Ballads I -- "Out there, you see real government": Mill avec Stephen -- "Indifference was impossible to him": Swinburne's Blake -- "Cases of extreme exigency": Mill's Exceptions -- The Laws of Meter: Lyric as Thought -- Historical Tropes -- 4. The Philosophy of Romance Form -- System, Exemplum, Imperium -- Realism Wars: James/Howells, Lang/Haggard -- "Kill! Kill! Kill!": King Solomon's Mines I -- Just War, Unjust Enemies: Transvaal 1885 -- "Almost unbounded rights of sovereignty": King Solomon's Mines II -- "As good as Homer!": Andrew Lang's Epic Form -- Radically Both: Stevenson's Strange Case.
Summary:
What is the difference between peace and war? In this far-reaching and provocative study, Nathan K. Hensley shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed literary 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 armed conflicts: the first liberal state in history brought the world to order with hands stained in blood. Hensley unpacks the seeming paradoxes of the Pax Britannica's endless war by showing that the equipoise of the Victorian state depended on physical force to guarantee it. While inherent to all law, sovereign violence shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized. Hensley tracks some of the era'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 generated techniques of representation that might account for fact that an empire built on freedom had the threat of death coiled at its very heart.0Free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the category of novelistic action itself: these and other seemingly 'aesthetic' matters, Hensley shows, in fact mediate a problem that was finally political, yet unthinkable from within the assumptions of orthodox Victorian theory. In contrast to the progressive idealism that remains our common sense, the writers at the core of Forms of Empire moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. Drawing on robust archival work, careful 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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.