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 tortureas a technique of state terrorismevolved in relation to nineteenthcentury 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 lesserknown 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 statesanctionedand at times statesponsoredtorture establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary neoimperialism and global politics.