The Ideas in Things
豆瓣
Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
Elaine Freedgood
简介
"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 reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels - Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Dickens' 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 field of object studies, "The Ideas in Things" pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.
contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Things
1. Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and Slavery in Jane Eyre
2. The Vicissitudes of Coziness: 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