Amanda Shubert's "Seeing Things"

Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches and writes on Victorian literature and culture.

Shubert applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture, with the following results:

Page 99 of Seeing Things comes midway through a chapter that discusses the virtual aesthetics of the Koh-i-noor diamond. The Koh-i-noor was the nineteenth-century’s most infamous diamond, both for its large size and its history of violent conquest. The British East India Company pillaged the diamond from Lahore in 1849 at the culmination of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, which saw the annexation of the Punjab. Today, many view the Koh-i-noor as a symbol of British colonial rapacity. But in the mid- nineteenth century, British people were thrilled to learn that Queen Victoria now possessed this supposedly dazzling jewel. It was put on display at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 as a symbol not of rapacity, but its opposite: Britain’s moral and civilizing conquest of an allegedly barbaric subcontinent.

My chapter tells the story of how the attempt to fashion the Koh-i-noor as an imperial symbol failed for aesthetic reasons: the Koh-i-noor did not sparkle. Page 99 begins by arguing that “the British East India Company and the British Crown were promoting brands of empire that were not speaking to the tastes of the British public. Rather than plunder empire or moral empire, the British public expressed a desire for an optical empire that would express itself through the diamond’s virtual aesthetics.” At this point, the chapter pivots from an analysis of the Koh-i-noor’s media aesthetics and its reception history at the Great Exhibition to an analysis of literary texts that that re-enchanted the Koh-i-noor by imagining “large colonial diamonds as technologies for ‘vision at a distance’—diamonds that made empire perceptible through their optical properties.” On that same page, I introduce a short story by the Irish-American writer Fitz-James O’Brien called “The Diamond Lens” (1859). In subsequent pages, I argue that this story is a parable of the Koh-i-noor that satisfies the cultural demand for a diamond that would act as a portal to India through its virtual aesthetics of sparkling and magnification.

A reader who turned to page 99 would certainly get a good view of the chapter’s main argument! This page also accurately captures my overall method in Seeing Things. Readers would see that I portray Victorian virtual aesthetics as a set of discourses and practices found at the intersection of optical media formats and imaginative fiction; and they would come away recognizing that imaginary media—such as diamonds with impossible, science fictional properties—are crucial objects of study that can illuminate both the history of optical media and the role of empire in everyday British life.

Visit Amanda Shubert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue