Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty
My book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford UP, Nov. 2016 [UK]; Jan. 2017 [US]), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. (No single year of Victoria's reign, 1837-1901, was without at least one imperial war.) Taking the permanent war of the Pax Britannica as a starting point, this study argues that coming to terms with the seeming paradoxes of liberal violence spurred Victorian writers to generate new modes of literary representation, formal innovations able to account for the fact that their modern liberal society had the threat of death coiled at its heart. More information about the book is available at the OUP site, here. Articles relating to this line of work have appeared in Victorian Studies and Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and are available as PDFs via links at right. "A masterful and beautifully written book of commanding scope..." "Well written, bracingly argued, replete with insights, the book is a significant achievement." |
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