Archive of Essays
Below is a list of my published essays and reviews, many of which are available here in PDF form. Please follow the links to access the files, and feel free to get in touch if you'd like to discuss any of these. Thanks for checking them out.
1936 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation redlining map of Fresno, California, my hometown.
Recent Writing:
“Landscape with Storm (Unfinished).” In special forum, “Weather.” Vanessa Warne, ed. Victorian Review 47.1 (Spring 2021): 34-40. [landscapewithstormpublishedversion.pdf]
"Remapping White Childhood: On Fresno Redlining." Los Angeles Review of Books. October 5, 2021. c. 6,000 words.
Review of Fuel: An Ecocritical History (Bloomsbury, 2018). By Heidi C.M. Scott. Nineteenth Century Contexts 42.1 (Spring 2020)
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Publications
"Commitment." Introduction to special essay cluster, "Commitment," coedited with Molly Clark Hillard. Victorian Literature and Culture 48.2 (2020): 391-405.
“Any Material Way.” In “Essays in Honor of Elaine Freedgood,” Carolyn Betensky and Mary Mullen, eds. Victorian Literature and Culture 47.3 (Fall 2019): 663-670.
“Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal.” Co-authored with Philip Steer. In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham UP, 2019: 63-84. [Note: the linked PDF also includes the Introduction to Ecological Form, also cowritten with Philip Steer.]
“Drone Form: Mediation at the End of Empire.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 51.2 (Summer 2018), special issue on “Neoliberalism and the Novel”): 226-249.
“Environment.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018, keywords issue): 676-681.
“Soot Moth: biston betularia and the Victorian End of Nature.” Co-authored with John Patrick James. BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. August 28, 2018. 7,000 words.
“Scale and Form; Or, What Was Global Modernism?” Co-authored with Thomas S. Davis. In “Scale and Form,” Modernism/Modernity Print + Platform. January 4, 2018. 2,800 words.
“Database and the Future Anterior: Reading The Mill on the Floss Backwards.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 50.1 (April 2017; Special issue, “Narrative Against Data,” Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal, eds.): 117-137.
“Unquiet Slumbers.” In “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies 59.1 (Autumn 2016, pub. Spring 2017): 113-116.
“After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe.” Nineteenth Century Contexts 38.5 (December 2016): 399-415.
“Network: Andrew Lang and the Distributed Agencies of Literary Production.” Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (Fall 2015). Special issue, “A Return to Theory,” Edited by Matthew Philpotts. 359-382.
“Empire.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, eds. London: Blackwell, 2015.
“What is a Network (and Who is Andrew Lang)?” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (2013, pub. date spring 2014). Special issue, “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method.” Edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Molly Clark Hillard. 5,000 words.
“Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies 56.1 (Fall 2013, pub. date spring 2014): 59-83.
“Allegories of the Contemporary.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.2. (Special issue on contemporary fiction, Summer 2012): 276-300.
“Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism.” Victorian Studies 51.4 (2009): 607-632.
“Mister Trollope, Lady Credit, and the Way We Live Now.” In The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century. Regenia Gagnier, Margaret Markwick, and Deborah Morse, eds. London: Ashgate, 2009: 147-160.
Review Essays
“Figures of Reading.” On Garrett Stewart’s Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 54.2 (Spring 2012): 329-342.
“Punishing Disciplines.” On Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds., Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. minnesota review 58-60 (2003): 311-316.
Reviews
Review of Fuel: An Ecocritical History (Bloomsbury, 2018). By Heidi C.M. Scott. Nineteenth Century Contexts DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2019.1658469.
“Cruising Dystopia.” Review of The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form. By Gage McWeeny. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 1,600 words.
Review of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford UP, 2012) Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, eds. Notes & Queries 63.3 (2016): 489-491.
Review of Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Virginia UP, 2009). By Edward Adams. Victorian Studies 55.4 (2013): 746-749.
Review of The Keats Brothers: A Life (Harvard, 2012). By Denise Gigante. Notes & Queries 59.4 (2012): 609-610.
Review of Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2011). By Ayse Celikkol. Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.1 (June 2012): 118-122.
“Media Wars.” Review of War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. By Mary Favret. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.1 (Spring 2012): 129-132.
Essays in the Public Sphere
“Catastrophe and Knowledge.” The Ecologist. December 10, 2018. 2,200 words. https://theecologist.org/2018/dec/10/catastrophe-and-knowledge-our-nineteenth-century
“Hold My Hand.” Dickens and the Darkness. Eleanor Courtemanche, editor. 1,200 words. March 10, 2017. https://dickensdarkness.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/hold-my-hand/
“Our Ghosts: On Internment in Fresno.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 3,000 words. March 5, 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-ghosts-on-japanese-internment-in-fresno
“Swinburne’s Oxford Notebook: Violence in/as Form.” b2O: The peer-reviewed online journal of Boundary 2. V21 Special Issue. October, 2016. http://www.boundary2.org/2016/10/nathan-k-hensley-swinburnes-oxford-notebook-violence-inas-form/(Peer reviewed)
“Rebuilding Reason.” Essay solicited for “The Challenge of Climate Change,” in Global Future of the Environment, Global Futures Initiative, Georgetown University. September 12, 2016. https://globalfutures.georgetown.edu/responses/rebuilding-reason
“Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire.” e-flux journal 72 (April, 2016). 5,000 words: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/drone-form-word-and-image-at-the-end-of-empire/
“In this Dawn to be Alive: Versions of the ‘Postcritical,’ 1999, 2015.” Essay for colloquium, “We, Reading, Now,” at the Stanford Arcade. (2,500 words): http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/dawn-be-alive-versions-“postcritical”-1999-2015 (Peer reviewed)
“Caine Prize Material.” Essay commissioned by the Caine Prize for African Writing, July 5, 2013. (1,100 words): http://caineprize.blogspot.com/2013/07/caine-prize-material-by-nathan-hensley.html
“Landscape with Storm (Unfinished).” In special forum, “Weather.” Vanessa Warne, ed. Victorian Review 47.1 (Spring 2021): 34-40. [landscapewithstormpublishedversion.pdf]
"Remapping White Childhood: On Fresno Redlining." Los Angeles Review of Books. October 5, 2021. c. 6,000 words.
Review of Fuel: An Ecocritical History (Bloomsbury, 2018). By Heidi C.M. Scott. Nineteenth Century Contexts 42.1 (Spring 2020)
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Publications
"Commitment." Introduction to special essay cluster, "Commitment," coedited with Molly Clark Hillard. Victorian Literature and Culture 48.2 (2020): 391-405.
“Any Material Way.” In “Essays in Honor of Elaine Freedgood,” Carolyn Betensky and Mary Mullen, eds. Victorian Literature and Culture 47.3 (Fall 2019): 663-670.
“Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal.” Co-authored with Philip Steer. In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham UP, 2019: 63-84. [Note: the linked PDF also includes the Introduction to Ecological Form, also cowritten with Philip Steer.]
“Drone Form: Mediation at the End of Empire.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 51.2 (Summer 2018), special issue on “Neoliberalism and the Novel”): 226-249.
“Environment.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018, keywords issue): 676-681.
“Soot Moth: biston betularia and the Victorian End of Nature.” Co-authored with John Patrick James. BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. August 28, 2018. 7,000 words.
“Scale and Form; Or, What Was Global Modernism?” Co-authored with Thomas S. Davis. In “Scale and Form,” Modernism/Modernity Print + Platform. January 4, 2018. 2,800 words.
“Database and the Future Anterior: Reading The Mill on the Floss Backwards.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 50.1 (April 2017; Special issue, “Narrative Against Data,” Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal, eds.): 117-137.
“Unquiet Slumbers.” In “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies 59.1 (Autumn 2016, pub. Spring 2017): 113-116.
“After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe.” Nineteenth Century Contexts 38.5 (December 2016): 399-415.
“Network: Andrew Lang and the Distributed Agencies of Literary Production.” Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (Fall 2015). Special issue, “A Return to Theory,” Edited by Matthew Philpotts. 359-382.
“Empire.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, eds. London: Blackwell, 2015.
“What is a Network (and Who is Andrew Lang)?” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (2013, pub. date spring 2014). Special issue, “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method.” Edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Molly Clark Hillard. 5,000 words.
“Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies 56.1 (Fall 2013, pub. date spring 2014): 59-83.
“Allegories of the Contemporary.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.2. (Special issue on contemporary fiction, Summer 2012): 276-300.
“Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism.” Victorian Studies 51.4 (2009): 607-632.
“Mister Trollope, Lady Credit, and the Way We Live Now.” In The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century. Regenia Gagnier, Margaret Markwick, and Deborah Morse, eds. London: Ashgate, 2009: 147-160.
Review Essays
“Figures of Reading.” On Garrett Stewart’s Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 54.2 (Spring 2012): 329-342.
“Punishing Disciplines.” On Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds., Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. minnesota review 58-60 (2003): 311-316.
Reviews
Review of Fuel: An Ecocritical History (Bloomsbury, 2018). By Heidi C.M. Scott. Nineteenth Century Contexts DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2019.1658469.
“Cruising Dystopia.” Review of The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form. By Gage McWeeny. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 1,600 words.
Review of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford UP, 2012) Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, eds. Notes & Queries 63.3 (2016): 489-491.
Review of Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Virginia UP, 2009). By Edward Adams. Victorian Studies 55.4 (2013): 746-749.
Review of The Keats Brothers: A Life (Harvard, 2012). By Denise Gigante. Notes & Queries 59.4 (2012): 609-610.
Review of Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2011). By Ayse Celikkol. Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.1 (June 2012): 118-122.
“Media Wars.” Review of War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. By Mary Favret. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.1 (Spring 2012): 129-132.
Essays in the Public Sphere
“Catastrophe and Knowledge.” The Ecologist. December 10, 2018. 2,200 words. https://theecologist.org/2018/dec/10/catastrophe-and-knowledge-our-nineteenth-century
“Hold My Hand.” Dickens and the Darkness. Eleanor Courtemanche, editor. 1,200 words. March 10, 2017. https://dickensdarkness.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/hold-my-hand/
“Our Ghosts: On Internment in Fresno.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 3,000 words. March 5, 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-ghosts-on-japanese-internment-in-fresno
“Swinburne’s Oxford Notebook: Violence in/as Form.” b2O: The peer-reviewed online journal of Boundary 2. V21 Special Issue. October, 2016. http://www.boundary2.org/2016/10/nathan-k-hensley-swinburnes-oxford-notebook-violence-inas-form/(Peer reviewed)
“Rebuilding Reason.” Essay solicited for “The Challenge of Climate Change,” in Global Future of the Environment, Global Futures Initiative, Georgetown University. September 12, 2016. https://globalfutures.georgetown.edu/responses/rebuilding-reason
“Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire.” e-flux journal 72 (April, 2016). 5,000 words: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/drone-form-word-and-image-at-the-end-of-empire/
“In this Dawn to be Alive: Versions of the ‘Postcritical,’ 1999, 2015.” Essay for colloquium, “We, Reading, Now,” at the Stanford Arcade. (2,500 words): http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/dawn-be-alive-versions-“postcritical”-1999-2015 (Peer reviewed)
“Caine Prize Material.” Essay commissioned by the Caine Prize for African Writing, July 5, 2013. (1,100 words): http://caineprize.blogspot.com/2013/07/caine-prize-material-by-nathan-hensley.html