"Although Brown is by no means the first to argue that literature can ’redeem’ the material world from commodification, he does so engagingly, with ingenuity, tact, and an admirable breadth of reference. . . . A Sense of Things combines fresh thinking about literary texts with scrupulous attention both to historical context and to a wide range of speculative effort, from Thoreau through Simmel, Benjamin and Lukacs to Adorno and Lacan. The concept of fetishism seems to be enjoying a vigorous afterlife in cultural theory (after Freud, that is, as well as Marx); Brown has contributed powerfully to its nurture."

David Trotter | London Review of Books

“It turns out that to animate things is to resuscitate wit and free the intellect for mysterious destinies where literature and social science share a common root in the poetics of the commodity. Bill Brown has given us an artful book about the tricks that history plays on our soulful views of things, and it is an American book, extending in ways wondrous and wise where the great European theorists of the fetish and the arcades left off. This is genuinely new thought. What could be better?”<Michael Taussig, Columbia University

Michael Taussig, Columbia University

“With a stylistic clarity and argumentative confidence unparalleled in the profession of American literary study, Brown achieves a brilliant balance of proximity to and analytical distance from his objects of examination, weaving a ranging theoretical knowledge into exquisite close textual readings that co-animate each other in a breathtaking dialectic. A Sense of Things is so intellectually engaging that one wants to read the book from start to finish without interruption—a virtually incomparable achievement in a critical climate of increasingly rarefied and closed literary conversations.”<Julia Stern, Northwestern University

Julia Stern, Northwestern University

“A Sense of Things is a truly remarkable book—that rare thing, a conceptually innovative scholarly work that non-specialists will learn from and, more than that, enjoy.  Beautifully written, it uncovers the depths of America’s ambivalent love affair with things; America’s fear of being possessed by the things it possesses; its will to find ideas in things; and its will, no less strong, to take those ideas out again. Of late we have heard a great deal about literary criticism losing its way, and, specifically, about literary history being engulfed by cultural history. Bill Brown puts paid to all of that. Who else has his ability to engage us with a new story about American culture that also reinvigorates and stretches our understanding of the literary heritage?”<Simon During, The Johns Hopkins University

Simon During, The Johns Hopkins University

“Brown, with his typical perspicacity, has synthesized the Marxist materialism of Adorno and Benjamin with both phenomenology and the pragmatism of William James. In doing so, he posits a paradigm of premodern American literature that enables an understanding of the emergence of modernism and that reconsiders the role material things serve in Western culture. The study of all American literature can benefit from Brown’s work.”

Dan Colson | Dreiser Studies

“Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things was one of the most eagerly awaited books in recent American literary studies. . . .It’s likely that you’ll emerge from this book wanting not to trash your books by the guiding intellectual lights of new historicism, Marx and Foucault, but to re-read them.”

Gustavus T. Stadler | Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature

"A complex and yet stimulating read. Never content with presenting a single hypothesis, Brown continually challenges his own conclusions."

Kirk Curnutt | Journal of American History