Changing the Victorian Subject
Edited and Introduction by Maggie Tonkin, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (University of Adelaide Press, 2014)
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The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.
Contents
1.Re-visiting the Victorian subject
Maggie Tonkin, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-01
2. Queen Victoria’s Aboriginal subjects: a late colonial Australian case study
Amanda Nettelbeck
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-02
3. Identifying with the frontier: Federation New Woman, Nation and Empire
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-03
4. A ‘Tigress' in the Paradise of Dissent: Kooroona critiques the foundational colonial story
Margaret Allen
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-04
5. The making of Barbara Baynton
Rosemary Moore
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-05
6. A literary fortune
Megan Brown
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-06
7. Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man and ‘the copy within’
Dorothy Driver
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-07
8. Guy Boothby’s 'Bid for Fortune': constructing an Anglo-Australian colonial identity for the fin-de-siècle London literary marketplace
Ailise Bulfin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-08
9. The scenery and dresses of her dreams: reading and reflecting (on) the Victorian heroine in M.E. Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife
Madeleine Seys
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-09
10. The woman artist and narrative ends in late-Victorian writing
Mandy Treagus
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-10
11. Miss Wade’s torment: the perverse construction of same-sex desire in Little Dorrit
Shale Preston
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-11
12. 'All the world is blind': unveiling same-sex desire in the poetry of Amy Levy
Carolyn Lake
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-12
13. From 'Peter Panic' to proto-Modernism: the case of J.M. Barrie
Maggie Tonkin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20851/victorian-subject-13
Review
'The Victorian subject has been considered in this collection to be a permeable, dynamic, expanding category. This is in distinction to a unitary, static, rational self. However, it is not the Victorian alone that the editors are interested in. Changing the Victorian Subject is as much about changing the Victorian subject as it is about changing the Australian subject, the South African subject, the English subject, the colonial subject, the Aboriginal subject, the subject itself. The subject is considered here as something akin to the self as well as to an academic discipline. The editorial juxtaposition of diverse authors strengthens this claim, rather than diminishes it, and read together the essays throw light on each other in ways they might not have if read alone.'
R.D. Wood, University of Western Australia, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature , Vol 14, No 5 (2014)