Overview

Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literature-from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen-The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.

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9783593500065

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Babette Barbel Tischleder's readings of texts are no less fresh and forceful than the topics those texts bring into focus: object agency, obsolescence, patina, and (magnificently) the recalcitrance of things. The book is a timely and important contribution to American studies and to object studies both. --Bill Brown author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature Dialogically balancing literature and theory, The Literary Life of Things reveals a system of literary objects that do not simply reflect our world but refract, distort, and change it, and in doing so it heralds a period of necessary introspection and maturation for the new materialism. --Critical Inquiry

Babette Barbel Tischleder's readings of texts are no less fresh and forceful than the topics those texts bring into focus: object agency, obsolescence, patina, and (magnificently) the recalcitrance of things. The book is a timely and important contribution to American studies and to object studies both. --Bill Brown author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

Babette Barbel Tischleder's readings of texts are no less fresh and forceful than the topics those texts bring into focus: object agency, obsolescence, patina, and (magnificently) the recalcitrance of things. The book is a timely and important contribution to American studies and to object studies both. --Bill Brown author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

Author Information

Babette Barbel Tischleder is professor of North American studies at Gottingen University, Germany.

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