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
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 Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations—it argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside their symbolic systems. Contributing to the new field of object studies in the humanities, the book pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.
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 |