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Full Description
What are we to make of the Victorians' fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-Ã -brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-Ã -Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-Ã -brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher's Stone and even the household nail.
Contents
Contents: Literary bric-à -brac: introducing things, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Bric-à -brac or architectonicè? Fragment and form in Victorian literature, Nicholas Shrimpton; Bricabracomania! Collecting, corporeality and the problem of things in Victorian literature, Victoria Mills; 'Beautiful things': nonsense and the museum, Anna Barton and Catherine Bates; Browning's curiosities: The Ring and the Book and the 'democracy of things', Jennifer McDonell; The bric-à -brac wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman, Bernard Beatty; Inhospitable objects in M.R. James, Luke Thurston; On the nail: functional objects in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, David Trotter; Shopping to survive: consumerism and evolution in M.E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Sara Clayson; Charlotte Brontë's frocks and Shirley's queer textiles, Deborah Wynne; The philosopher's stone and the key to all mythologies: Mary Anne South, George Eliot and the object of knowledge, Jayne Elisabeth Archer; The ideas in Thing Town: Villette, art and moveable objects, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Works cited; Index.
