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

Regular price €47.99
Regular price €49.99 Sale Sale price €47.99
A01=Daniel Schneider
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Anglo-Irish
Anti-systematic Thinking
Associative Mode
Author_Daniel Schneider
automatic-update
Bill Brown
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=HBJD1
Category=NHD
Commodity Culture
Confer
COP=United Kingdom
De Juventute
Delivery_Pre-order
Dialectical Object
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_non-fiction
Essay Genre
Essayistic Speaker
Familiar Essays
Follow
Hazlitt’s Essays
Human Beings
Irish Literature
Language_English
Material Items
Michel De Montaigne
PA=Not yet available
Periodical Essay
Personae
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Forthcoming
Roundabout
Semantic Surplus
softlaunch
Thing Culture
Timeless
Toy Farm
Transformative Mode
Vice Versa
Young Man

Product details

  • ISBN 9781032374055
  • Weight: 490g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 18 Dec 2024
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. Yet, particularly British and Anglo-Irish literature display a long, albeit so far implicit tradition of texts that can be categorised as ‘thing-essays’: Starting with Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) and continuing until today, these texts draw broader insights from the contemplation of a material item of daily life. This book provides the first theoretical conceptualisation of this genre. Bringing elements from essay studies and the New Materialisms together, it shows why the essay lends itself particularly well to literarisations of the personal relationships that people foster to everyday objects. While the idiosyncrasies of each essay show the versatility of thing-essays, the study also seeks to unearth changing attitudes towards things – and thus towards people’s material surroundings in general – throughout time. In order to account for such synchronic and diachronic differences in thing-essays, this study develops a typology of three modes via which things can be approached essayistically. In the book’s second part, this framework will be employed in close readings and historicisations of 14 thing-essays from 1701 until 2021. Ranging from satire to sentimental writing, from religion to consumerism, from class to gender differences, from feelings of nationality to exoticism, 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.

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.