Andrew McCann. Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne. Carleton, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-522-85122-3. Price: AU$49.95.

Andrew McCann’s Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia introduces readers to a figure little known to North American and European literary scholars. Clarke, who emigrated from England to Australia in 1863, became one of Australia’s premier journalists and novelists, yet despite his notoriety in colonial Melbourne, he found little recognition for his work outside of Australia—the fate of most Australia-based writers then and, to some degree, now. As McCann suggests, Clarke’s most well known text, His Natural Life (1874), is the only nineteenth-century Australian text to have achieved anything resembling canonical status outside of Australia. On the other hand, the recent trend toward transnational literary criticism indicates that the nation-based exclusions of literary canons are breaking down, and rightfully so. As such, McCann’s book is a timely contribution to critical conversations about the production and circulation of texts in a world structured by the imbricated forces of capitalism and imperialism. McCann implicates Clarke in these global structures, but he also points to the ways in which Clarke’s geographic position allowed him distinct insight into their operations. For writers of the 1870s who had lived in metropolitan and colonial locations, it was “still possible […] to grasp the abstracting forces of capitalism without the redeeming effects of national belonging” (5). Settler locations like Australia “distil the essence of modernity” by virtue of an undeveloped Australian national consciousness and an abundance of cosmopolitan influences (5). In Clarke’s works, these conditions translate into a literary aesthetic that highlights the dislocations of colonial modernity, denying Romantic essences and making colonial identity (if there is such a thing, McCann qualifies) hinge upon instability and dislocation. For the settler society, there is no past national culture or value system against which capitalist modernity is defined; rather, settler origins are modernity. The Bohemian embodies this sense of dislocation. He (and McCann explicitly genders the Bohemian male) figures in Clarke’s writing as a homeless itinerant or vagabond who explores and adapts to every location he inhabits, however temporary. His rootlessness renders him marginal and yet, at the same time, representative of the settler colony as the condition of modernity itself. In much of Clarke’s journalism, this cosmopolitan Bohemian appears as a “peripatetic philosopher” who plumbs the depths of “Lower Bohemia,” revealing Melbourne’s metropolitan aspirations to be vacuous and the moral and aesthetic value of entertainment similarly empty and commodified. He is grotesque narrator on the outside of society, yet he is “still able to move within [society] as an impostor preying, sometimes resentfully, upon its stupidity” (69). Clarke’s “Lower Bohemia” is as ephemeral as the literary marketplace, and Clarke’s writing often parodies its own pretentions to literary genius through excessive citation of more well-known writers. In one of his most interesting claims, McCann argues that Clarke’s comic approach to the marketplace also naturalized settler society, recoding the colonization process as peaceful and natural. McCann draws heavily on Marxist aesthetic theory, particularly that of Walter Benjamin, and takes as his point of departure the assumption that literary texts may tend toward the utopian in their evocation of pleasure, but that textual production is undergirded by a dialectical relation between the utopian and the commodified. Inevitably, the same texts that offer up utopian fantasy are embedded in material conditions, thus enabling a productive juxtaposition between real and ideal. According to McCann this is no textual unconscious: Clarke’s corpus—from his journalistic writing to his novels and short stories—attempts to foreground and meditate on its own material production. Clarke’s formal choices illustrate his fascination with the logic of commodity capitalism and the marketplace for entertainment. These include an interrogation of Romantic claims toward a distinction …