Table of Contents

Contents: Literary bric-à-brac: introducing things, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Bric-à-brac or architectonicè? Fragment and form in Victorian literature, Nicholas Shrimpton; Bricabracomania! Collecting, corporeality and the problem of things in Victorian literature, Victoria Mills; ’Beautiful things’: nonsense and the museum, Anna Barton and Catherine Bates; Browning’s curiosities: The Ring and the Book and the ’democracy of things’, Jennifer McDonell; The bric-à-brac wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman, Bernard Beatty; Inhospitable objects in M.R. James, Luke Thurston; On the nail: functional objects in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, David Trotter; Shopping to survive: consumerism and evolution in M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Sara Clayson; Charlotte Brontë’s frocks and Shirley’s queer textiles, Deborah Wynne; The philosopher’s stone and the key to all mythologies: Mary Anne South, George Eliot and the object of knowledge, Jayne Elisabeth Archer; The ideas in Thing Town: Villette, art and moveable objects, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Works cited; Index.

About the Author

Jonathon Shears is Lecturer in English at Keele University and Jen Harrison holds a PhD in Victorian and children's literature, and is currently a teacher of secondary school English.

Reviews

'The essays in this collection negotiate the blocks and diversions that things create in our reading of literary texts, and come up with a variety of engaging results, sometimes suggesting new ways into nineteenth-century material culture, sometimes teasing at the practice of reading itself.' Review of English Studies