The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789-1832: Conspicuous Things

ISBN-13: 9783030491130 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 247 str.

Nikolina Hatton

Spis treści

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgements

 

List of Figures

 

Chapter 1

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

O autorze

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.

Blurb

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.