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Full Description
The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789-1832: Conspicuous Things engages with new materialist methodologies to examine shifting perceptions of nonhuman agency in English prose at the turn of the nineteenth century. Examining texts as diverse as it-narratives, the juvenile writings and novels of Jane Austen, De Quincey's autobiographical writings, and silver fork novels, Nikolina Hatton demonstrates how object agency is viewed in this period as constitutive—not just in regard to human subjectivity but also in aesthetic creation. Objects appear in these novels and short prose works as aids, intermediaries, adversaries, and obstructions, as well as both intimately connected to humans and strangely alien. Through close readings, the book traces how object agency, while sometimes perceived as a threat by authors and characters, also continues to be understood as a source of the delightfully unexpected—in everyday life as well as in narrative.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Objects in Prose, from Actants to Things.- Chapter 2: A Pin, A Mirror, and a Pen: Everyday It-Narrators, Conspicuous Tools.- Chapter 3: "Very conspicuous on one of his fingers": Generative Things in Austen's Juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility and Emma.- Chapter 4: Unwieldy Objects in De Quincey's Confessions (1821): Things that Undermine Subjectivity.- Chapter 5: Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects.- Chapter 6: Conclusion: All Those "tables and chairs"—Productive Objects and Chaotic Things?
