Taking up the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian culture, this collection advances our understanding of materiality by examining the miscellaneous, moveable and rejected objects often overlooked in the discourses of thing theory. Essays examine writers as different as Lear, Browning, Balzac and Dickens to show how the things that make up Victorian literature can fall in and out of use, become undesignated and abject and evade the familiar categories of commodification.

Jonathon Shears is Lecturer in English at Keele University and Jen Harrison holds a PhD in Victorian and children's literature, and is currently a teacher of secondary school English.

Contents: Literary bric-à-brac: introducing things, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Bric-à-brac or architectonicè? Fragment and form in Victorian literature, Nicholas Shrimpton; Bricabracomania! Collecting, corporeality and the problem of things in Victorian literature, Victoria Mills; 'Beautiful things': nonsense and the museum, Anna Barton and Catherine Bates; Browning's curiosities: The Ring and the Book and the 'democracy of things', Jennifer McDonell; The bric-à-brac wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman, Bernard Beatty; Inhospitable objects in M.R. James, Luke Thurston; On the nail: functional objects in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, David Trotter; Shopping to survive: consumerism and evolution in M.E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Sara Clayson; Charlotte Brontë's frocks and Shirley's queer textiles, Deborah Wynne; The philosopher's stone and the key to all mythologies: Mary Anne South, George Eliot and the object of knowledge, Jayne Elisabeth Archer; The ideas in Thing Town: Villette, art and moveable objects, Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison; Works cited; Index.