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



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Autore: Freedgood Elaine Visualizza persona
Titolo: The ideas in things : fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel / / Elaine Freedgood Visualizza cluster
Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2006
Edizione: 1st ed.
Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (208 p.)
Disciplina: 823/.8093553
Soggetto topico: English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism
Material culture in literature
Material culture - Great Britain - History - 19th century
Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-186) and index.
Nota di contenuto: 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
Sommario/riassunto: 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.
Titolo autorizzato: The ideas in things  Visualizza cluster
ISBN: 1-282-75401-7
9786612754012
0-226-26154-9
Formato: Materiale a stampa
Livello bibliografico Monografia
Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
Record Nr.: 9910815606003321
Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
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