Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain
Autor Katherine Judith Andersonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 7 apr 2022
Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Katherine Judith Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity, since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned––and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215128
ISBN-10: 0814215122
Pagini: 228
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215122
Pagini: 228
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“In this innovative and original study, Katherine Judith Anderson explores the intimate entwinement, and evolution of, torture … Will prove of value to scholars in a wide range of disciplines.” —Deana Heath, Critical Studies on Terrorism
“Anderson wants her study to be read as a contribution to further thought, so that we will not be condemned to making the same mistakes over and again. That is a fine end to a fine, scholarly book, reminding us why the study of literature matters. The thoroughness of Anderson’s work is very impressive [...], and it really makes a valuable contribution to Victorian studies.” —A. G. van den Broek, George Eliot Review
“While Twisted Words is groundbreaking in terms of the extraordinarily broad range of literary and non-literary Victorian texts it surveys, its most original feature is its consideration of violence in torture as not sadistic but used to advance the agenda of the state. Scholars of various disciplines will find Twisted Words both provocative and challenging.” —Jarlath Killeen, author of The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories
"[Twisted Words] is an ambitious and wide-ranging monograph that will be of interest to many scholars working on liberalism, violence, empire, and readerly experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture." - Rachel Ablow, Nineteenth-Century Literature
“Anderson’s meticulous analysis and judicious use of interdisciplinary material make Twisted Words a particularly effective monograph in dealing with the nineteenth century’s faults and failures in a way that seeks empathy for and understandings of both its oppressors and victims.” —Alexi Decker, Romance, Revolution & Reform
Notă biografică
Katherine Judith Anderson is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Western Washington University.
Extras
I argue that torture was central to the history, literature, and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire, despite the corresponding evolution of liberalism. Consequently, Victorian history and culture deserve more attention in our global and historical analyses of torture and state terrorism. Though Victorian studies has yet to treat torture as a central topic for consideration, it has touched upon it in relation to an increasing interest in theorizing pain. This is due largely to Elaine Scarry’s important investigation of torture in relation to pain and language, which has influenced most, if not all, subsequent philosophical and literary analyses of pain. Lucy Bending and Rachel Ablow, for example, explore what Ablow, following Wittgenstein, calls the language game of pain, tracking its meaning across theological versus medical contexts of the late nineteenth century in Bending’s case, and clarifying the liberal resonances of the epistemological approach, grounded in the unknowability of other people’s pain and made use of by nineteenth-century writers, in Ablow’s. Torture also emerges as a reliable focal point in sympathy and empathy studies and in human rights studies, as in Lynn Hunt’s intellectual history on the invention of human rights. In a 2013 article appearing in ELH, Ablow analyzes the “continuities between nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century fantasies of torture and sympathy” (“Tortured” 1164), arguing that our ongoing fascination with torture is rooted in an assumption about “what separates the recognizably human person from the recognizably inhuman person”: pain is the only language those designated as inhuman can understand, and therefore the only thing that can make them speak truth (1149). Nevertheless, even for Ablow, torture does not appear to be a “particularly live issue in nineteenth-century England” (1159). This book makes the case that it was. Further, while Twisted Words is indebted to scholars such as Scarry, Ablow, and Hunt in various ways which will become obvious in the following chapters, it departs from their studies in its central preoccupations. I’m not concerned with theorizing the pain of torture in relation to language, nor with considering how pain helps to ground eighteenth- or nineteenth-century articulations of sympathy or empathy, though I engage with these issues occasionally in the chapters that follow. I’m interested in torture’s role as a form of terrorism wielded by the modern, liberal state.
...
I argue that torture, as act and as word, evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism to combine the traditional definition of spectacular acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. The legal definition of torture, as Edward Peters explains, refers to “something that a public authority does or condones”; it is its “public dimension” that “distinguishes torture from other kinds of coercion or brutality” (3). Most torture scholars agree on these characteristics. Consequently, I define torture as a state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that is inflicted to elicit a specific response from either the victim, those who hear about the act (witnesses in a broad sense), or both. Torture is distinct from sadism because of this purpose. Bentham declared that though in a “popular sense” the word torture was “often used for corporal pain existing in a high degree,” in its “legal sense” it was “confined to corporal pain inflicted for the purpose of compulsion” (“Of Torture” 43). Compulsion is the necessary component in legal definitions of torture. Peters blames the Victorians for first muddying these definitional waters, complaining that it was in the nineteenth century that the definition of torture became largely sentimental, so that “‘torture’ may finally mean whatever one wishes it to mean, a moral-sentimental term designating the infliction of suffering, however defined, upon anyone for any purpose—or for no purpose” (2). It’s my intention to rebut this accusation of Victorian sentimentality. Twisted Words reveals the seriousness of nineteenth-century struggles to categorize multiple forms of state-sanctioned, exceptional violence and to account for changing definitions of human rights and citizenship, arguing that these struggles reverberate into the present. The Victorians’ difficulties with torture, in fact, were eerily similar to those we face in our own post-9/11 modernity.
...
I argue that torture, as act and as word, evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism to combine the traditional definition of spectacular acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. The legal definition of torture, as Edward Peters explains, refers to “something that a public authority does or condones”; it is its “public dimension” that “distinguishes torture from other kinds of coercion or brutality” (3). Most torture scholars agree on these characteristics. Consequently, I define torture as a state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that is inflicted to elicit a specific response from either the victim, those who hear about the act (witnesses in a broad sense), or both. Torture is distinct from sadism because of this purpose. Bentham declared that though in a “popular sense” the word torture was “often used for corporal pain existing in a high degree,” in its “legal sense” it was “confined to corporal pain inflicted for the purpose of compulsion” (“Of Torture” 43). Compulsion is the necessary component in legal definitions of torture. Peters blames the Victorians for first muddying these definitional waters, complaining that it was in the nineteenth century that the definition of torture became largely sentimental, so that “‘torture’ may finally mean whatever one wishes it to mean, a moral-sentimental term designating the infliction of suffering, however defined, upon anyone for any purpose—or for no purpose” (2). It’s my intention to rebut this accusation of Victorian sentimentality. Twisted Words reveals the seriousness of nineteenth-century struggles to categorize multiple forms of state-sanctioned, exceptional violence and to account for changing definitions of human rights and citizenship, arguing that these struggles reverberate into the present. The Victorians’ difficulties with torture, in fact, were eerily similar to those we face in our own post-9/11 modernity.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Introduction Torture, Terrorism, Liberalism, Citizenship Chapter 1 Church: Sensory Liberalism and Liturgies of Torture Chapter 2 Imperial Bureaucracy: Liberal Modernity and the Banality of Empire Chapter 3 Military: Liberal Citizens Versus Military Habitus Chapter 4 Family: Gendered Liberalism and Patriarchal Sovereignty Chapter 5 Settler: Liberal Sovereignty and Vigilante Terrorism Coda The Way We Liberate Now Bibliography Index
Descriere
Applies critical terrorism studies to fiction by Eliot, Trollope, and others to argue that Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture as a tool of the state.