Obsolete objects in the literary imagination : ruins, relics, rarities, rubbish, uninhabited places, and hidden treasures / Francesco Orlando ; tr. from the Italian by Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel, with the collab. of Alessandra Grego ; foreword by David Quint.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Orlando, Francesco, 1934-2010.

Standardized Title:

Oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Exoticism in literature.

Picturesque, The, in literature.

Ruins in literature.

Literature, Modern--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (521 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Note on the Translation

I What This Book Is About

II First, Confused Examples

III Making Decisions in Order to Proceed

IV A Tree Neither Genealogical Nor Botanical

V Twelve Categories Not to Be Too Sharply Distinguished

VI Some Twentieth-Century Novels

VII Praising and Disparaging the Functional

Notes

Index of Subjects

Index of Names and Texts

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

9786611728915

9781281728913

1281728918

9780300138214

0300138210

OCLC:

1013956760

Publisher Number:

9780300108088