Critical discussions of the animation of objects in literature and culture have persisted in seei... more Critical discussions of the animation of objects in literature and culture have persisted in seeing agency as a human attribute, which is extended or applied to nonhumans. By contrast, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory defines action as a matter of delegation, or making others—and being made to—do things. These processes connect humans and nonhumans together in networks. Reminding us that Latour’s notion of the actor is derived from literary structuralism’s concept of the actant, this essay argues that eighteenth-century prose fiction and material technology are domains in which the processes of delegation between humans and nonhumans come to be codified. In particular, I read it-narratives—eighteenth-century novels told by objects—not as works of fiction extending narrativity to nonhuman protagonists, but as networks in which the functions associated with third-person narration (omniscience, omnipresence, omnitemporality) are assigned to mechanical devices. A Latourian reading of the narration of it-narratives, including The Golden Spy (1709), The Sedan (1757), and Chrysal, or Adventures a Guinea (1760-64), reveals these objects to be the forerunners of omniscient narrators, and presents human characters as objects of delegation within narrative networks.
: Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spa... more : Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spaces of habitation, another type of interior space dominates fiction pre-1800. This is a space of storage, which holds material objects in reserve and keeps them at hand for human characters, instead of arranging persons and objects together as spaces of habitation do. Spaces of storage, such as bundles, trunks, magazines, and other containers, have their contents represented aperspectivally, via enumeration rather than spatially situated description. In picaresque fiction and early 18th-century English novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack, as well as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, these bundled objects generate narrative rather than furnishing a setting for human action.
Critical discussions of the animation of objects in literature and culture have persisted in seei... more Critical discussions of the animation of objects in literature and culture have persisted in seeing agency as a human attribute, which is extended or applied to nonhumans. By contrast, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory defines action as a matter of delegation, or making others—and being made to—do things. These processes connect humans and nonhumans together in networks. Reminding us that Latour’s notion of the actor is derived from literary structuralism’s concept of the actant, this essay argues that eighteenth-century prose fiction and material technology are domains in which the processes of delegation between humans and nonhumans come to be codified. In particular, I read it-narratives—eighteenth-century novels told by objects—not as works of fiction extending narrativity to nonhuman protagonists, but as networks in which the functions associated with third-person narration (omniscience, omnipresence, omnitemporality) are assigned to mechanical devices. A Latourian reading of the narration of it-narratives, including The Golden Spy (1709), The Sedan (1757), and Chrysal, or Adventures a Guinea (1760-64), reveals these objects to be the forerunners of omniscient narrators, and presents human characters as objects of delegation within narrative networks.
: Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spa... more : Although accounts of novelistic description have assumed that interior spaces are primarily spaces of habitation, another type of interior space dominates fiction pre-1800. This is a space of storage, which holds material objects in reserve and keeps them at hand for human characters, instead of arranging persons and objects together as spaces of habitation do. Spaces of storage, such as bundles, trunks, magazines, and other containers, have their contents represented aperspectivally, via enumeration rather than spatially situated description. In picaresque fiction and early 18th-century English novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack, as well as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, these bundled objects generate narrative rather than furnishing a setting for human action.
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