Portable Property
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A Modest Proposal
A Passage to India
A01=John Plotz
Author_John Plotz
Bathos
Becky Sharp (character)
Benedict Anderson
Bildungsroman
Cambridge University Press
Category=JHB
Category=NHD
Colonialism
Commodity
Cranford (novel)
Daniel Deronda
Deterritorialization
E. M. Forster
Emily Eden
English novel
English poetry
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
G. (novel)
George Eliot
George Lamming
Gwendolen
Hamlin Garland
Hannah Arendt
Illustration
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
In the Castle of My Skin
Irony
Jude the Obscure
Lavengro
Liberalism
Literary realism
Literature
Lorna Doone
Malthusianism
Margaret Oliphant
Melodrama
Metonymy
Modernity
Monomania
Narrative
National identity
Necessary Illusions
News from Nowhere
Novel
Novelist
On Liberty
Oxford University Press
Poetry
Princeton University Press
Public sphere
R. D. Blackmore
Racism
Ricardian (Richard III)
Romanticism
Routledge
Samson Agonistes
Subaltern (postcolonialism)
Superiority (short story)
The Other Hand
The Realist
The Story of the Glittering Plain
The Sundering Flood
The Various
The Woodlanders
Thomas Hardy's Wessex
V. S. Naipaul
Victorian era
Victorian literature
Wardian case
Wessex Poems and Other Verses
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691146621
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 13 Dec 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly.
Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.
John Plotz is associate professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of "The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics".
