The Secret Life of Things

The Secret Life of Things serves to encapsulate the most important work done recently on eighteenth-century it-narratives, while advancing the field significantly. It is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the eighteenth-century it-narrative for years to come, while also being of permanent interest to students of the history of the novel. Adam Potkay, author of Hope: A Literary History

Mark Blackwell has assembled a group of lively, provocative, and readable essays. We are lucky to have them. . . . The Secret Life of Things is an erudite and enjoyable guide, well-written and wide-ranging.’
  Review of English Studies

Blackwell’s collection marks the arrival of a substantial new body of work. Admirably inclusive . . . The Secret Life of Things will be useful for anyone who is working on objects in eighteenth-century narrative. TLS

Blackwell’s collection brings together some of the best previously published essays on eighteenth-century thinginess, such as Aileen Douglas’s essay on it-narratives and empire (1993), and important new work by Barbara Benedict, Jonathan Lamb, Deidre Lynch, Markman Ellis, Lynn Festa, and Blackwell himself, among others . . . [This] is a valuable collection for eighteenth-century studies and for ‘thing-theory’ more generally. Modern Philology

I think (this volume) represents essentially the best-case scenario for the edited collection of literary criticism that is organized not for a series or as primarily a teaching tool but as the best way of compiling a field’s state of knowledge on an emerging topic . . . (it) remains an indispensable resource for scholars working on a host of topics related to the it-narrative and the animated objects of eighteenth-century literature. SEL

Complex and sophisticated. . . . Blackwell’s volume both carefully scrutinizes it-narratives and provides interesting perspectives on them. Style

The collection . . . adroitly consolidates, assesses, and extends the best work available in this fruitful intersection of theory and culture. The book boasts some of the most distinguished scholarly critics of the 18th-century operating in the field today, and one finds herein numerous instances of scintillating and luminous critical prose. . . . Recommended. CHOICE

The Secret Life of Things fully realizes the ambitions that Mark Blackwell established for the volume—both to leaven the history of prose fiction and to contribute to our understanding of eighteenth-century attitudes towards the new object world —ambitions that square with those of the Bucknell series in which it appears, devoted to eighteenth-century literature and culture. ECF

By bringing our attention to a genre that realizes the apparently impossible condition of material objects behaving as narrative protagonists, Blackwell's collection destabilizes our received impressions of eighteenth-century narrative as an evolving institution of realism . . . [I]ntriguing analyses and claims fill The Secret Life of Things. Eighteenth-Century Life