The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789-1832

The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 17891832: 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 constitutivenot 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 unexpectedin everyday life as well as in narrative.

Participates in the methodological shift within literary studies that challenges the supremacy of the human Bridges existing scholarship on objects in eighteenth-century literature and culture and objects in Victorian literature and culture Analyzes multiple genres including short narrative, novel, didactic literature, and autobiography

Autorentext
Nikolina Hatton is Assistant Professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, where she researches early modern women's writing. She is co-editor of Hacks, Quacks & Impostors: Affected and Assumed Identities in Literature (2019). Her work has appeared in Open Cultural Studies.

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  Klappentext

  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.

  Inhalt

  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 chairsProductive Objects and Chaotic Things?