Bodies And Things In Nineteenth-century Literature And Culture (palgrave Studies In Nineteenth-century Writing And Culture)

This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Bodies and Things....Pages 1-16 Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary....Pages 17-41 Front Matter....Pages 43-43 ‘The end of all the privacy and propriety’: Fanny’s Dressing Room in Mansfield Park ....Pages 45-65 Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity, and Clothing in Trollope’s ‘The Turkish Bath’....Pages 66-83 Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones....Pages 84-103 Front Matter....Pages 105-105 Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine....Pages 107-129 ‘Books in my Hands — Books in my Heart — Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature....Pages 130-152 Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Museums....Pages 153-174 Front Matter....Pages 175-175 Aesthetic Woman: The ‘Fearful Consequence’ of ‘Living Up’ to One’s Antiques....Pages 177-196 The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice....Pages 197-217 Front Matter....Pages 219-219 The Bodies of Things....Pages 221-228 Back Matter....Pages 229-254 In the nineteenth century, the relationship between the human body and the object world was redefined by momentous social, cultural, and scientific changes. This book traces the emergence of an exciting range of ideas about materiality, phenomenological experience, and the realm of objects in nineteenth-century literature and culture. The book features contributions by leading specialists in the field as well as the work of younger colleagues. The collection sheds new light on the porous boundaries, affinities, and frictions between bodies and things in the nineteenth-century imagination by drawing on the insights of gender studies, postcolonial studies, the history of science, and performance studies. The contributors explore canonical nineteenth-century works by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront︠, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, alongside less-familiar texts, such as travelogues, cartoons and scientific treatises, and a wide range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques