The Secret Life of Things

MARK BLACKWELL is a professor of English at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. He is the editor of British It-Narratives, 1750-1830 and his work has appeared in ECTI, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, The Cambridge History of the English Novel, and The Blackwell Companion to the English Novel.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory
Mark Blackwell
Part I: The Stories Things Tell
The Spirit of Things
Barbara M. Benedict
The Rape of the Lock as Still Life
Jonathan Lamb
Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions
Deidre Lynch
Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility
Markman Ellis
PartII:ApproachingIt-Narratives
It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre
Liz Bellamy
Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator
Aileen Douglas
Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction
Christopher Flint
Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration
Mark Blackwell
Occupying Works: Animated Objects and Literary Property
Hilary Jane Englert
Circulating Anti-Semitism: Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal
Ann Louise Kibbie
Corkscrews and Courtesans: Sex and Death in Circulation Novels
Bonnie Blackwell
It-Narratives: Fictional Point of View and Constructing the Middle Class
Nicholas Hudson
Part III: It-Narratives in Transition
The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Object Narratives
Lynn Festa
Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value
John Plotz
Contributors
Index