Objects we traditionally regard as "mere" imitations of the human--dolls, automata, puppets--proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called "the novel" that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. Park makes a bold intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the...
Objects we traditionally regard as "mere" imitations of the human--dolls, automata, puppets--proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expa...