The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
Elaine Freedgood
Abstract
While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. This book explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, the book reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building its case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels—the mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's ... More
Keywords: Victorian novels, nineteenth-century fiction, Victorian texts, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, Great Expectations, commodity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226261553 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226261546.001.0001 |
