Nasser Mufti’s Civilizing War offers comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis from Britain’s Anglophone empire. In insightful analyses of writings as diverse as those by Carlyle, Engels, Disraeli, Doyle, Kipling, Conrad, Naipaul, Gordimer, and Ondaatje, Mufti shows how narratives of civil war are integral to the politics of empire.
From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression.
