Ronjaunee Chatterjee

Middlemarch (Norton Critical Edition)

W.W Norton & Company

2024

This Norton Critical Edition includes: 

• The 1874 corrected edition of the text, with small textual variations from Eliot’s manuscript. 
• Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Ronjaunee Chatterjee. 
• Twenty-three background selections from Eliot’s correspondence, journals, and other writings. 
• Seventeen critical responses, including five contemporary reactions and twelve critical analyses of the novel’s most important themes. 
• A chronology of Eliot’s life and a selected bibliography.

Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Stanford University Press

2022

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.

Reviewed in Genre, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and cahiers victoriens et édouardiens. 

Books 

• Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford University Press, August 2022). 
• Editor, Middlemarch by George Eliot (Norton Critical Editions, 2024)

Editorial Work 

• Co-editor, "Undisciplining Victorian Studies." Special Issue of Victorian Studies 62, no. 3 (Spring 2020)

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters 

• "Realism and Gender." Forthcoming in Realism and the Novel: A Literary History (Cambridge UP). 
• “Bearing the Intolerable: Analytic Love.” differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33: 2-3 (2022). 
• “Middlemarch: A Grown-Up Novel.” George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 2:21 (2021).
• Introduction (co-written with Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong), “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Special Issue of Victorian Studies 62: 3 (Spring 2020). Winner of the NAVSA Donald Gray Prize.
• Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45:4 (2017).
• “Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity.” French Studies 70:1 (January 2016).

Review Essays

• “The Colonial Mentality: Past and Present.” Review of The Global Indies by Ashley Cohen. The Los Angeles Review of Books (3 September 2021) 
• “Figure / Ground.” Response to The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak. Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group (September 2021).  
• “Closed off and Already Over?” Review Essay on Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood. Syndicate Literature (January 2021).
• Replotting Marriage in the Nineteenth Century ed. Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie. Nineteenth-Century Literature 74.1(2019).
• Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life by Mari Ruti. ASAP/Journal (2018).
• Willful Submissions: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry by Amanda Paxton. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40:2 (2018).
• Multimedia Archaeologies: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Belle Époque Paris, and the Total Artwork by Andrea Mirabile. Comparative Literature Studies 53:1 (2016).

Essays and Public Writing 

• “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (co-written with Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong). Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 July 2020.
• “Politics, Inclusion, and Social Practice.” V21 Collective, 12 December 2016.
• “Thinking Singularity.” V21 Collective, 20 April 2015.
• “Ghostbusters.” Review of A Life with Mary Shelley by Barbara Johnson. The New Inquiry, 14 October 2014.
• “The Sins of the Fathers.” Review of Élizabeth Roudinesco’s Lacan in Spite of Everything.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 June 2014.
• “Alain Badiou in Southern California: A Politics of the Impossible.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 February 2014.
• “Hitting on Infinity.” Review of Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 August 2013.
• Review of Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta. The Rumpus, 25 April 2013.