Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: Bodies and Things

   1. Introduction: Bodies and Things

      • Katharina Boehm

      Pages 1-16

3. Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary

   1. Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary

      • Isobel Armstrong

      Pages 17-41

4. Spaces

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 43-43

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   2. ‘The end of all the privacy and propriety’: Fanny’s Dressing Room in Mansfield Park

      • Kirstyn Leuner

      Pages 45-65

   3. Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity, and Clothing in Trollope’s ‘The Turkish Bath’

      • Catherine Spooner

      Pages 66-83

   4. Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones

      • Muireann O’Cinneide

      Pages 84-103

5. Practices

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 105-105

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   2. Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine

      • Samantha Matthews

      Pages 107-129

   3. ‘Books in my Hands — Books in my Heart — Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature

      • Victoria Mills

      Pages 130-152

   4. Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Museums

      • Kate Hill

      Pages 153-174

6. Performances

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 175-175

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   2. Aesthetic Woman: The ‘Fearful Consequence’ of ‘Living Up’ to One’s Antiques

      • Anne Anderson

      Pages 177-196

   3. The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice

      • Stefania Forlini

      Pages 197-217

7. Epilogue

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 219-219

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   2. The Bodies of Things

      • Bill Brown

      Pages 221-228

8. Back Matter

   Pages 229-254

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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.

• Charles Dickens
• Cultural Studies
• culture
• English literature
• Jane Austen
• literary studies
• technology
• British and Irish Literature

"This remarkable collection of essays makes an important contribution to the study of material culture in the nineteenth century, querying not just the obsessive prevalence of 'things' in the literature of the period but also the limits and margins of that material world." Journal of Victorian Culture

"Isobel Armstrong contributes a brilliantly wide-ranging first chapter which forges fascinating connections between (among other things) Jane Eyre's favourite plate, Karl Marx's commoditized table, and several grotesque vases from the Great Exhibition... Bodies and Things is worth picking up for Armstrong's essay alone, but the rest of the collection does not disappoint in taking up the questions she sets out... These works by historians, art historians, and scholars of literature and culture are well marshalled into a collection that makes a significant intervention into the study of the object in the nineteenth century." Beth Palmer, Modern Language Review

• University of Regensburg, Germany

  Katharina Boehm

ANNE ANDERSON Independent scholar, UK ISOBEL ARMSTRONG Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair), Birkbeck College, University of London, UK BILL BROWN Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, University of Chicago, USA STEFANIA FORLINI Assistant Professor in English, University of Calgary, Canada KATE HILL Senior Lecturer in History, University of Lincoln, UK KIRSTYN LEUNER Doctoral candidate in English, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA SAMANTHA MATTHEWS Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK VICTORIA MILLS Birkbeck College, University of London, UK MUIREANN O'CINNEIDE Lecturer in English, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland CATHERINE SPOONER Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster University, UK

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