The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Buchnell Studies in Eighteenth-century Literature and Culture) - Hardcover
Synopsis
This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise "The Secret Life of Things" thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in "Chrysal" to jingoistic imperialism in "The Adventures of a Rupee", from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology. Other essays situate it-narratives in the context of changing attitudes toward occult powers, the development of still-life painting, the ethical challenges posed by pet ownership and slavery to the culture of sensibility, the circulation of books in the public sphere, the cult of Sterne and the appearance of genre fiction, and the emergence of moral-didactic children's literature at the turn of the nineteenth century.
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