Changing the Victorian Subject

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Madeleine Seys, Maggie Tonkin and Mandy Treagus. Changing the Victorian Subject. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014. 292 pp. $44 ISBN: 978-1-922064-73-8 (Pbk) ISBN: 978-1-922064-74-5 (Free E-book PDF)Edited by the University of Adelaide's Madeleine Seys, Maggie Tonkin and Mandy Treagus and the University of Wollongong's Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Changing the Victorian Subject brings together thirteen essays from a number of different disciplines to discuss the idea of the subject in Victorian era novels. There are however, chapters that do not focus on novels, instead examining history and poetics. The text is self-consciously situated as an inter-disciplinary work and the editors argue that to include work from 'art history and criticism, museum studies, the history of costume and textiles, performance and music studies, periodical studies, the history of technology and science, theology and religious history' (3) as well as literary studies and history reflects the historical reality of the Victorian era itself. If the Victorian period was about 'creating new markets, new colonies and new subjects' (2), Changing the Victorian Subject aims to create new knowledge, new discourse and new ways of reading the past.The editors discuss 'the intersection of the Victorian with the colonial, and an interrogation of the varied relationships between the colonial Victorian subject and hegemonic British Victorian mores and values' (2). It makes the post-colonial point that 'Victorian Britain is inseparable from its Empire' which 'necessitates a reconsideration of what can be regarded as Victorian culture or literature . . . Thus British literature should be read in tandem, indeed in tension with, colonial literatures' (4). They work against the idea of reading within a national context alone (8). The project-of destabilising nation as a limited category of analysis-is a productive one, which can be used to further interrogate the historical idea of the novel as simply part of the nation building process. This is not to suggest it is an altogether new avenue of academic investigation in Victorian studies and one could cite Sharon Marcus's piece 'Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies' from 2003 as merely one prior example. Nor is it to suggest that, for example, a specific novel did not contribute to the creation of a consciousness that enabled 'Australia' to think itself for example, but to point out the two most apparent paradoxes in this. First, that 'Australia' is at once an autonomous discursive product yet simultaneously participates in a worldly system of exchanges that contest its very autonomy; and second, that the novel is a semiotic economy that is at once 'novel' (meaning new) yet is also indebted to its novelistic precursors and that its own language comes from the world as it already exists. The tensions abound then and some questions are: what nation is one's own that thinks itself as one's own and what word is one's own that thinks itself as one's own when nation and word take form in the life of the world? What are Victorian studies or Australian literary studies in that case? These are important questions to consider when re-framing specific texts from a national critical lens to a transnational one and it suggests a wider theoretical debate about the nature of heteronomy and autonomy and era and area studies than that articulated explicitly here.How though should we consider the frame that places these chapters together? What of the editorial choice that has allowed Guy Boothby to be read alongside J.M. Barrie, Barbara Baynton alongside M.E. Braddon? Taken as a whole, the choice seems judicious-each of the essays stands on its own and contributes to an overall project. However, the authors do point out that there are two parts to Changing the Victorian Subject. In their own words, 'the first part of the collection investigates the ways in which the Victorian subject and Victorian subjectivities were changed by historical forces and challenged in colonial texts from Australia and South Africa' and in the second part 'contributors explore Victorian writers' refashioning of authorial and gendered subjectivities' (12). …

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