"The Ideas in Things" explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels - Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations - Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels' symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the field of object studies, "The Ideas in Things" pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.
- ISBN10 0226261557
- ISBN13 9780226261553
- Publish Date 15 November 2006
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 184
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780226261553