300 pages | 7 color plates | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2014
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Lively Objects-Scenes of Animation and the American Literary Imagination
1. Sentimental Patina: The Ideal Ecology of Objects in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers
“The Ravages of a Carpet”: Novelty vs. Tradition
The Culture of Things: Morality vs. Anthropology
Sentimental Possession: An Anthropological Perspective
A Domestic World of Animate Things: Stowe’s Culture of Comfort
The Moral Lesson of Furniture: Against a World Robbed of Living Things
Criticism and Prospects
Sentimental Patina
2. Sacred Objects, Freakish Ornaments: Domestic Environmentalism in the Gilded Age
A Home Hallowed by Religion: Stowe’s Parlor Piety
Horace Bushnell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Domestic Environmentalism
Christian Commodities
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Disenchanted Vision of Home
Expressive Things, Impressionable Children
Gothic Things and Literary Houses
Yellow Environments, Vicious Storytelling
Nerves and Decoration
Home Influence and Domestic Mythology in the Post-Darwinian Age
Mental Myopia: From the Sanctuary to the Coop
3. The Scent of Things: Edith Wharton, Modern Subjectivity, and the Anatomy of Taste
The Self in/as a Cluster of Things: Metonymy and Modern Subjectivity
The Flower in the Hothouse: Lily’s Sensuous Nobility
The Scent of Things: Object Lessons and the Kinship of Taste
The Smell of Things
A Last Touch of Intimacy
4. Object Trouble: Thing Theory, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and the American Tradition of Recalcitrant Matter
Thing Theory, Philosophy, Satire: From Existentialism to Resistentialism
“Look at the Darned Thing”: Buster Keaton’s One Week
Recalcitrance by Human Design
Pnin: The American Scene in the 1950’s
Pninizing
A Strange World of American Things
Matters of Affection
Conclusion: Recalcatrince Revisited
5. The Thingness of the Text: Jonathan Franzen’s Rhopography of Obsolescence
The Matter of Obsolescence
Realism and Rhopography
The Blue Chair and the Tangibility of Things
The Matter of Entropy
Cultural Wars and the Empire of the Ephemeral
Existential Obsolescence
Unloved Objects
Negative Authenticity-Abject Realness
The Cluttered Text
Lists as Literary Still Lifes
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Things
Bibliography
Primary Works
Art, Photography, Film
Criticism and Theory
Index