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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.

English literature --- Sovereignty in literature --- History and criticism

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Decolonization in literature --- Decolonization in literature. --- French-Canadian literature --- Indigenous authors --- Sovereignty in literature --- Sovereignty in literature. --- LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. --- Indian authors --- History and criticism --- History and criticism.

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Old Norse literature --- Sovereignty in literature. --- Magic in literature. --- History and criticism.

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Sovereignty in literature --- Individuality in literature --- Kleist, Heinrich von, --- von Kleist, Heinrich --- Criticism and interpretation.

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In The Soldier's Two Bodies, James M. Greene investigates an overlooked genre of early American literature--the Revolutionary War veteran narrative--showing that it by turns both promotes and critiques a notion of military heroism as the source of U.S. sovereignty. Personal narratives by veterans of the American Revolution indicate that soldiers in the United States have been represented in two contrasting ways from the nation's first days: as heroic symbols of the body politic and as human beings whose sufferings are neglected by their country. Published from 1779 through the late 1850s, narrative accounts of Revolutionary War veterans' past service called for recognition from contemporary audiences, inviting readers to understand the war as a moment of violence central to the founding of the nation. Yet, as Greene reveals, these calls for recognition at the same time underscored how many veterans felt overlooked and excluded from the sovereign power they fought to establish. Although such narratives stem from a discourse that supports centralized, continental nationalism, they disrupt stable notions of a unified American people by highlighting those left behind. Greene discusses several well-known examples of the genre, including narratives from Ethan Allen, Joseph Plumb Martin, and Deborah Sampson, along with Herman Melville's fictional adaptation of the life of Israel Potter. Additional chapters focus on accounts of postwar frontier actions, including narratives collected by Hugh Henry Brackenridge that voice concerns over populist violence, along with stranger narratives like those of Isaac Hubbell and James Roberts, which register as fantastic imitations of the genre commenting on antebellum racial politics. With attention to questions of historical context and political ideology, Greene charts the process by which veteran narratives promote exception, violence, and autonomy, while also encouraging restraint, sacrifice, and collectivity. Revolutionary War veteran narratives offer no easy solutions to the appropriation of veterans' lives within military nationalism and sovereign violence. But by bringing forward the paradox inherent in the figure of the U.S. soldier, the genre invites considerations of how to reimagine those representations. Drawing attention to paradoxes presented by the memory of the American Revolution, The Soldier's Two Bodies locates the origins of a complicated history surrounding the representation of veterans in U.S. politics and culture.

American literature --- Sovereignty in literature. --- Soldiers in literature. --- Veterans' writings, American --- History and criticism. --- United States --- History --- Veterans. --- United States.