HENB0T151U Engelsk - Valgfag 1 - Introduktion til britiske studier B: Victorians and Material Culture

In recent years objects, materials and commodities have become a focus for literary studies. When Bill Brown edited and co-wrote a special issue of Critical Inquiry on ‘Thing Theory’ in 2001, he and his contributors sparked a strand of criticism on the intersections between materiality and literature. This course will introduce seminal work by Brown, Appadurai, Freedgood and others which gives a critical apparatus for talking about representations and stories of things. From colonial things, their networks and circulation, to commodity fetishes and the consumer object, this course will explore the texts and stories we inscribe on things. We will also look at animated objects, uncanny things and life stories encapsulated by souvenirs, photographs and memorials. Key texts will be short works by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. Ghost stories and stories of haunted things; texts about colonial objects: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.