The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, Oct 15, 2009 - Literary Criticism - 208 pages

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. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell.

Building her 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—Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels’ symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the new field of object studies in the humanities, The Ideas in Things pushes readers’ thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.

 

Contents

Reading Things
1
Mahogany Furniture Deforestation and Slavery in Jane Eyre
30
Checked Curtains and Global Cotton Markets in Mary Barton
55
Negro Head Tobacco in and around Great Expectations
81
Standardizing Meaning in Middlemarch
111
Victorian Thing Culture and the Way We Read Now
139
Notes
159
Index
187
Copyright

Other editions - View all

The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
Elaine Freedgood
Limited preview - 2010
The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
Elaine Freedgood
No preview available - 2006

Common terms and phrases

Aborigines alienation Allegories argued Australia Barthes become Britain British Cambridge Univ Caribbean Catherine Gallagher checked curtains Chicago Press colonial commodification commodity culture commodity fetish connections cotton critical deforestation describes detail Dickens disavowal discourse domestic Dorothea economic England English exchange famine Famines in India fetishistic figure Gaskell genocide George Eliot hereafter cited parenthetically hieroglyphics Hillis Miller Ideas in Things ideology imagined Imperialism India industrial interpretation Jane Eyre John Barton kind literal literature London Madeira madeira wine Magwitch mahogany mahogany furniture Marx Mary Barton material meaning metaphor metonymic metonymic reading middle-class Middlemarch narrative narrator Negro head tobacco nineteenth century novelistic things paradoxically perhaps practices production readerly readers realist novel reality effect representation rhetorical Roland Barthes Rome seems slavery Slavoj Žižek social relations space story subjects suggests Susan Stewart symbolic textile thing culture tion trans unconscious Victorian novel Victorian thing wood writing York

About the author (2009)

Elaine Freedgood is associate professor of English at New York University.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
AuthorElaine Freedgood
Editionillustrated, reprint
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN0226261549, 9780226261546
Length208 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Literary Criticism / General
  
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