Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures
Francesco Orlando
Abstract
Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, he traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional became the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western liter ... More
Keywords: Western literature, nonfunctional objects, ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, psychoanalysis, literary-political history, eighteenth-century industrialization, Western culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 | Print ISBN-13: 9780300108088 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 | DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300108088.001.0001 |
