Introduction: Objects in Prose, from Actants to Things
Historicizing the Material
Reevaluating Ways of Reading Objects
Heeding Object Agency
Literature as a Thing
Conspicuous Things, 1789–1832
Notes Bibliography
Chapter 2
A Pin, A Mirror, and a Pen: Everyday It-Narrators, Conspicuous Tools
It-Narratives in the Eighteenth Century
The History of a Pin (1798): Responsibility and the Didactic It-Narrator
Defamiliarizing the Satirical It-Narrator in “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791)
“The Adventures of a Pen” (1806) and (Hyper)Functioning Tools
Notes Bibliography
Chapter 3
“Very conspicuous on one of his fingers”: Generative Things in Austen’s Juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility and Emma
Objects, Consumerism, and Austen’s Literary Form
Genre Conventions and Objects in Austen’s Juvenilia
The Love Token as Plot Device in Sense and Sensibility
Pianofortes as Actants in Emma
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4
Unwieldy Objects in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821): Things that Undermine Subjectivity
De Quincey’s ‘Involutes’: Luggage, Books, and Other Conspicuous Objects
Indifferent Things in the House in London
Destroyed, Lost, and Appropriated Things in Oxford
“Turned out” of Dove Cottage (by Books)
The Nightmare: Things that Come Alive
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5
Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects
Fashionable Novels, Lithographs, and a Crisis of Representation
Describing the ‘Real’ in Catherine Gore’s Pin Money (1831)
Static Representations and Boredom in the Silver Fork Novel
Distancing the Reader from Representations: Performing Authorship
Notes Bibliography
Chapter 6
Conclusion: All Those “tables and chairs”—Productive Objects and Chaotic Things?
Bibliography
Index
Nikolina Hatton is Assistant Professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, where she researches early modern women’s writing. She is co-editor of Hacks, Quacks & Impostors: Affected and Assumed Identities in Literature (2019). Her work has appeared in Open Cultural Studies.
The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832: Conspicuous Things engages with new materialist methodologies to examine shifting perceptions of nonhuman agency in English prose at the turn of the nineteenth century. Examining texts as diverse as it-narratives, the juvenile writings and novels of Jane Austen, De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, and silver fork novels, Nikolina Hatton demonstrates how object agency is viewed in this period as constitutive—not just in regard to human subjectivity but also in aesthetic creation. Objects appear in these novels and short prose works as aids, intermediaries, adversaries, and obstructions, as well as both intimately connected to humans and strangely alien. Through close readings, the book traces how object agency, while sometimes perceived as a threat by authors and characters, also continues to be understood as a source of the delightfully unexpected—in everyday life as well as in narrative.