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. Jonathon Shears, Jen Harrison, Nicholas Shrimpton, Victoria Mills, Anna Barton, Catherine Bates, Jennifer McDonell, Bernard Beatty, Luke Thurston, David Trotter, Sara Clayson, Deborah Wynne, Jayne Elisabeth Archer.

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