Review: <i>Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature</i>, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee

Book Review| December 01 2023 Review: Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. x + 213. $60. Emily Harrington Emily Harrington University of Colorado, Boulder Emily Harrington is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Harrington is the author of Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse (Virginia University Press, 2014) and “Richard Le Gallienne and the Rhymers: Masculine Minority in the 1890s,” in Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (edited by Joseph Bristow; University of Toronto Press, 2023). Her work has also appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, and Studies in English Literature, and her most recent piece, “Night Lights: the 1890s Nocturne,” is forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1890s (edited by Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney; Cambridge University Press). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2023) 78 (3): 234–237. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Emily Harrington; Review: Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2023; 78 (3): 234–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.234 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search Feminine Singularity has no less an ambition than to ask us to rethink personhood: to discard “individualism,” a term by now overly freighted with the weight of capitalist, imperialist, gendered, and racialized expectations of over two hundred years, in favor of “singularity.” In doing so, Chatterjee finds alternative modes of thinking about what it means to be one person, in relation to another or to many, in and beyond the nineteenth century. She takes subjectivity out of a framework of identity, gendered binaries, and an economy of reproducibility in order to establish it as at once unique and irreducible yet also in relation. The dynamic between uniqueness and relation is represented, in Chatterjee’s analysis of Christina Rossetti, for example, in the term “likeness,” which implies similarity with room enough for difference. The liberal individual subject has its roots in the nineteenth century and, as Chatterjee notes, “liberal progress and freedom... You do not currently have access to this content.

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