The British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essay from 1701 to 2021

Auteur

Daniel Schneider is lecturer of English literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and freelance writer. His articles on literary representations of materiality and the literary essay have been published in international edited volumes and journals.

Texte du rabat

Ranging from satire to sentimental writing, from religion to consumerism, from the French Revolution to Freud and from art to everyday life, the stylistic and thematic broadness of these thing-essays ultimately shows the multifarious connections between human life and materiality.

Contenu

Introduction: A New Subgenre of the Essay

Part I When Essays and Things Meet

Chapter 1 The Essay's Democratic Potential

Chapter 2 Things and How They Appear to Us

Chapter 3 The Thing-Essay and Its Three Modes

Part II Between Thing Culture and Commodity Culture: A History of British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essays

Chapter 4 From Semantics to Sentimentality: Thing-Essays in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter 5 Thing-Essays during Romanticism

Chapter 6 From Thing Culture to Commodity Culture: Victorian Thing-Essays

Chapter 7 "An Indian Summer": The Democratisation of Thing-Essays in the Interwar Period

Chapter 8 "Things Have a Way of Insinuating Themselves into All Human Lives": Thing-Essays from the Post-War-Period until Today

Coda: Things to Come

Appendix