Katherine Judith Anderson’s Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain 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. The central claim of the book is that changing definitions of torture over the course of the nineteenth century reflect a normalization of state violence. While prior to this period, “torture” was understood to refer to “spectacular acts of cruelty,” this definition gradually came to be combined “with systemic, banal, or everyday violence” (p. 5). This shift, Anderson argues, exposes the liberal state’s reliance on “terrorism” as a way to “communicate the message of the state’s absolute power not only to its victims, but more importantly, to the broader audience of citizen-subjects throughout the British empire” (p. 7). The individual chapters are lively and engaging, and they explore an interestingly idiosyncratic archive...

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