It-Narratives in Anglophone Contemporary Literature

Kim Antonia Bührle

It-Narratives in Anglophone Contemporary Literature

ISBN 978-3-98940-103-7, 212 S., kt., € 35,00 (2026)

(ELCH - Studies in English Literary and Cultural History, Bd. 92)

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a certain genre was popular in Britain: it-narratives. In it-narratives, an animal or an inanimate object like a coin, pin, or banknote is turned into a protagonist – and sometimes a narrator – and followed as it moves across space and time, affecting animate and inanimate agents alike. The last decades have witnessed the emergence of what can be referred to as a ‘new generation’ of it-narratives. Contemporary Anglophone novels exhibit a preoccupation with objects and the material world. Some of them share striking features with traditional it-narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries. Often, one object is the main object which acts as the narrator, guides and structures the story or serves as the axis around which other characters’ stories spin while moving in the world and being given from hand to hand. This study focuses on analysing the role, function and meaning of human-made, mobile objects in these contemporary Anglophone novels and examining what forms the relationship between subjects and objects takes. As humans and objects are connected through stories and storytelling, this book investigates how the relationship between subjects and objects is constituted through stories and storytelling. By discarding a purely human-centric perspective on the world and turning the attention to objects to account for the inanimate, this study wants to make visible the interactions and interdependencies of objects and humans. Doing that, it seeks to contribute to the rethinking and reevaluation of the subject-object relationship in the 21st century.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)