Archive of Essays
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.
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.
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