The ideas in things : fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel / Elaine Freedgood.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Freedgood, Elaine.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Material culture in literature.

Material culture--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Material culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels-the mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and "Negro head" tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations-Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels' symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the new field of object studies in the humanities, The Ideas in Things pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading Things

1. Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and Slavery in Jane Eyre

2. Coziness and Its Vicissitudes: Checked Curtains and Global Cotton Markets in Mary Barton

3. Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide: Negro Head Tobacco in and around Great Expectations

4. Toward a History of Literary Underdetermination: Standardizing Meaning in Middlemarch

Coda: Victorian Thing Culture and the Way We Read Now

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-186) and index.

ISBN:

9786612754012

9781282754010

1282754017

9780226261546

0226261549

OCLC:

662453120