Acknowledgments
Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory
Mark Blackwell
Part I: The Stories Things Tell
The Spirit of Things
Barbara M. Benedict
The Rape of the Lock as Still Life
Jonathan Lamb
Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions
Deidre Lynch
Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility
Markman Ellis
PartII:ApproachingIt-Narratives
It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre
Liz Bellamy
Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator
Aileen Douglas
Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction
Christopher Flint
Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration
Mark Blackwell
Occupying Works: Animated Objects and Literary Property
Hilary Jane Englert
Circulating Anti-Semitism: Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal
Ann Louise Kibbie
Corkscrews and Courtesans: Sex and Death in Circulation Novels
Bonnie Blackwell
It-Narratives: Fictional Point of View and Constructing the Middle Class
Nicholas Hudson
Part III: It-Narratives in Transition
The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Object Narratives
Lynn Festa
Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value
John Plotz
Contributors
Index
About the author
MARK BLACKWELL is a professor of English at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. He is the editor of British It-Narratives, 1750-1830 and his work has appeared in ECTI, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, The Cambridge History of the English Novel, and The Blackwell Companion to the English Novel.
Summary
Enriching and complicating the history of fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century, this collection focuses on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, and advances important work on consumer culture and the theory of things.
