The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789-1832: Conspicuous Things

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Chapter 1

Introduction: Objects in Prose, from Actants to Things

            Historicizing the Material

            Reevaluating Ways of Reading Objects

            Heeding Object Agency

            Literature as a Thing

            Conspicuous Things, 1789-1832

            Notes
            Bibliography

Chapter 2

A Pin, A Mirror, and a Pen: Everyday It-Narrators, Conspicuous Tools

            It-Narratives in the Eighteenth Century

            The History of a Pin (1798): Responsibility and the Didactic It-Narrator

            Defamiliarizing the Satirical It-Narrator in "Adventures of a Mirror" (1791)

            "The Adventures of a Pen" (1806) and (Hyper)Functioning Tools

            Notes
            Bibliography

"Very conspicuous on one of his fingers": Generative Things in Austen's Juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility and Emma

            Objects, Consumerism, and Austen's Literary Form

            The Love Token as Plot Device in Sense and Sensibility

            Pianofortes as Actants in Emma

            Notes

            Bibliography

Chapter 4

Unwieldy Objects in De Quincey's Confessions (1821): Things that Undermine Subjectivity

            De Quincey's 'Involutes': Luggage, Books, and Other Conspicuous Objects

            Indifferent Things in the House in London

            Destroyed, Lost, and Appropriated Things in Oxford

            "Turned out" of Dove Cottage (by Books)

            The Nightmare: Things that Come Alive

            Notes

            Bibliography

Chapter 5

Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects

            Fashionable Novels, Lithographs, and a Crisis of Representation

            Describing the 'Real' in Catherine Gore's Pin Money (1831)

            Static Representations and Boredom in the Silver Fork Novel

            Distancing the Reader from Representations: Performing Authorship

Chapter 6

Conclusion: All Those "tables and chairs"-Productive Objects and Chaotic Things?

Index