Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques.

"This remarkable collection of essays makes an important contribution to the study of material culture in the nineteenth century, querying not just the obsessive prevalence of 'things' in the literature of the period but also the limits and margins of that material world." Journal of Victorian Culture

"Isobel Armstrong contributes a brilliantly wide-ranging first chapter which forges fascinating connections between (among other things) Jane Eyre's favourite plate, Karl Marx's commoditized table, and several grotesque vases from the Great Exhibition... Bodies and Things is worth picking up for Armstrong's essay alone, but the rest of the collection does not disappoint in taking up the questions she sets out... These works by historians, art historians, and scholars of literature and culture are well marshalled into a collection that makes a significant intervention into the study of the object in the nineteenth century." Beth Palmer, Modern Language Review

Auteur
ANNE ANDERSON Independent scholar, UK ISOBEL ARMSTRONG Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair), Birkbeck College, University of London, UK BILL BROWN Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, University of Chicago, USA STEFANIA FORLINI Assistant Professor in English, University of Calgary, Canada KATE HILL Senior Lecturer in History, University of Lincoln, UK KIRSTYN LEUNER Doctoral candidate in English, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA SAMANTHA MATTHEWS Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK VICTORIA MILLS Birkbeck College, University of London, UK MUIREANN O'CINNEIDE Lecturer in English, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland CATHERINE SPOONER Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster University, UK

Contenu
Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Bodies and Things; K.Boehm Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary; I.Armstrong PART I: SPACES 'The end of all the privacy and propriety': Fanny's Dressing Room in Mansfield Park; K.Leuner Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity, and Clothing in Trollope's 'Turkish Bath'; C.Spooner Travellers Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones; M.O'Cinneide PART II: PRACTICES Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine; S.Matthews 'Books in my Hands Books in my Heart Books in my Brain': Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature; V.Mills Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Museums; K.Hill PART III: PERFORMANCES Aesthetic Woman: The 'Fearful Consequence' of 'Living Up' to One's Antiques; A.Anderson The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice; S.Forlini PART IV: EPILOGUE The Bodies of Things; B.Brown Works Cited Index