Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book identifies a series of patterns that combine historical perspective with a theoretical underpinning. These include patterns of seduction, the object as a site for memorial, and the trope of the animation of the inanimate.

If all these patterns are dominated by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights on the other hand a more latent and opposite component: the fascination with the alterity of matter, which awakes thorny...