Critical Perspectives

In entitling this collection of essays Changing the Victorian Subject, we are not supposing that the Victorian subject has ever been singular or monolithic. Indeed, we take Martin Hewitt's caution against just such an assumption to be self-evident. In 2001 Hewitt wrote:

As academics based in Australia but working within a field that goes by the name of a British sovereign, we are fully cognisant of the plurality of what might fall under the rubric ‘Victorian’. The imagined relationships of colonial subjects to a foreign monarch, and a foreign yet hegemonic culture, need always to be imagined in the plural. For colonial subjects, the ‘Victorian’, even taken as ‘a label of purely temporal convenience’, is fraught with complexity and nuance, since in the colonies that very epoch saw the emergence of discourses of nationhood and of anti-colonial rhetoric, alongside strident declarations of allegiance and conformity to metropolitan values.

The author may be dead as far as Roland Barthes is concerned, but the news is yet to hit the street. Probably nothing speaks more loudly of the gap between academic literary criticism and the culture of reading outside the academy than the latter's continuing obsession with the author. Barthes's claim that the author is neither the originator nor the final determiner of textual meaning has assumed the status of orthodoxy in scholarly poetics. Whilst the early austerity has faded somewhat, such that discussion of the historical specificity of the author is no longer scorned in literary studies, the Romantic privileging of the author as the ‘fully intentional, fully sentient source of the literary text, as authority for and limitation on the “proliferating” meanings of the text’, as Andrew Bennett puts it (55), has never regained its former currency. Yet outside the academy, public fixation on the figure of the author has never been greater: the author is now a communal fetish.

J.M. Barrie, famed for his authorship of Peter Pan, is a case in point. Peter Pan has long been neglected within the academy, but recently the tide has turned and it has become the focus of renewed scholarly attention. However, as Peter Hollindale notes, there are ‘two co-existent stories’ about Peter Pan, ‘each with the capacity to distort or confuse our understanding of the other’ (‘A Hundred Years’ 199), for alongside the renewed scholarly attention to Barrie's best-known work has emerged a public fixation on his life, which is manifest in popular cultural forms such as biography, film, popular science books and websites.