Includes bibliographical references and index.

Literary bric-�a-brac: introducing things / Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison -- Bric-�a-brac or architectonic�e? fragment and form in Victorian literature / Nicholas Shrimpton -- Bricabracomania! collecting, corporeality and the problem of things / 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-�a-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 Bront�e'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.

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2013. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.