Customer Reviews

A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

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A delightful and wonderfully oblique reading of America's fascination with things and objects, Bill Brown's *A Sense of Things* inspires the reader to think twice about the ways in which American literature structures one's knowledge via a negotiation with the inanimate, the commodity, the artifact: in short things that should be stable but are always in excess of themselves. Readings on James, Jewett, Twain, and Norris prove just how much a committed historical/material literary analysis may accomplish. Definitely worth the labor of reading for its deferred critical pleasures. A slim but dense book, a little object itself, that gratifies.

I'm in the process of writing my Master's Thesis in English literature and I was hunting for an accessible but in-depth introduction to Thing Theory and poststructural material culture. Bill Brown is a (the) master of the field and his articulation of things and their significance in major works of literature was provocative and highly instructive. The book provides an exhaustive review of the field/theory and applies it in interesting and novel ways: works well as both an intro and a complication of material culture/thing theory studies. (May be a bit dense for true newbies to the field)