The ideas in things [[electronic resource] ] : fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel / / Elaine Freedgood

• Autore: Freedgood Elaine
• Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2006
• 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
• Soggetto non controllato: thing theory, victorian, literature, great expectations, charles dickens, tobacco, negro head, mary barton, elizabeth gaskell, calico curtains, jane eyre, charlotte bronte, furniture, mahogany, sadism, power, violence, control, hierarchy, colonialism, slavery, plantation, deforestation, cozy, domesticity, cotton markets, capitalism, middlemarch, george eliot, genocide, fetishism, realism, novel, nonfiction, material culture, objects
• 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
• ISBN: 1-282-75401-7; 9786612754012; 0-226-26154-9
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910784931803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II