Feminine Singularity

The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Ronjaunee Chatterjee

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781503630802
• eBook ISBN: 9781503632318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity—for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject—and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world.

Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests across poetry and prose through likeness and minimal difference, rather than individuality and identity. Reading for singularity shows us the ways femininity is fundamentally entangled with racial difference in the nineteenth century and well into the contemporary, as well as how rigid categories can be unsettled and upended.

Grappling with the ongoing violence embedded in the Western liberal imaginary, Feminine Singularity invites readers to commune with the subversive potentials in nineteenth-century literature for thinking subjectivity today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity
• Chapter 2. Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity
• Chapter 3. Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness
• Chapter 4. Seriality, Singularity, Sociality: The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index