The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England

The Secret Life of Things enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding in the mid-eighteenth century and Austen at the turn of the nineteenth by focusing on it-narratives, or novels of circulation, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays in this volume thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-Semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology. Other essays situate it-narratives in the context of changing attitudes toward occult powers, the development of still-life painting, the ethical challenges posed by pet ownership and slavery to the culture of sensibility, the circulation of books in the public sphere, the cult of Sterne and the appearance of genre fiction, the emergence of moral-didactic children's literature at the turn of the nineteenth century, and a better-known tradition of Victorian thing-narratives.
Stylistically and thematically consistent, the essays in The Secret Life of Things approach it-narratives from various theoretical and historical vantage points, and together they begin to sketch the cultural biography of a neglected literary form.