Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.
Introduction: Peregrine Things: Rethinking the Global in
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Ileana Baird
Introduction: Through the Prism of Thing Theory: New Approaches to the
Eighteenth-Century World of Objects
Christina Ionescu
Part I Western European Fads: Porcelain, Fetishes, Museum Objects, Antiques
1 Caution, Contents May Be Hot: A Cultural Anatomy of the Tasse Trembleuse
Christine A. Jones
2 Cultural Currency: Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea, and the
Material Shape of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity
Kevin Bourque
3 Feather Cloaks and English Collectors: Cooks Voyages and the Objects of
the Museum
Sophie Thomas
4 Imagining Ancient Egypt as the Idealized Self in Eighteenth-Century
Europe
Kevin M. McGeough
Part II Under Eastern Eyes: Garments, Portraits, Books
5 Frills and Perils of Fashion: Politics and Culture of the
Eighteenth-Century Russian Court through the Eyes of La Mode
Victoria Ivleva
6 From Russia with Love: Souvenirs and Political Alliance in Martha Wilmots
The Russian Journals
Pamela Buck
7 The Battle of the Books in Catherine the Greats Russia: From a Jousting
Tournament to a Tavern Brawl
Rimma Garn
Part III Latin American Encounters: Coins, Food, Accessories, Maps
8 From Peruvian Gold to British Guinea: Tropicopolitanism and Myths of
Origin in Charles Johnstones Chrysal
Mauricio E. Martinez
9 Eating Turtle, Eating the World: Comestible Things in the Eighteenth
Century
Krystal McMillen
10 The Fur Parasol: Masculine Dress, Prosthetic Skins, and the Making of the
English Umbrella in Robinson Crusoe
Irene Fizer
11 Terra Incognita on Maps of Eighteenth-Century Spanish America:
Commodification, Consumption and the Transition from Inaccessible to Public
Space
Lauren Beck
Part IV Imagining Other Spaces: Trinkets, Collectibles, Ethnographic
Artifacts, Scientific Objects
12 (Re-)Appropriating Trinkets: How to Civilize Polynesia with a
Jack-in-the-Box
Laure Marcellesi
13 Images of Exotic Objects in the Abbé Prévosts Histoire Générale des
Voyages
Antoine Eche
14 Souvenirs of the South Seas: Objects of Imperial Critique in Jonathan
Swifts Gullivers Travels
Jessica Durgan
Ileana Baird is a Postdoctoral Preceptorship Fellow at the University of Virginia, USA.
Christina Ionescu is an Associate Professor of French Studies at Mount Allison University, Canada.
More info about Taylor & Francis e-books