Objects and Memorabilia

 A new scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film

Editors: Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres, Danielle Mariann Dove

Palgrave MacMillan

ISBN: 978-3-031-06201-8

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.

The book contains the chapter:

Objects and Memorabilia in Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects

by Rosario Arias 

This chapter explores Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015) in the light of a renewed interest in Victorian material culture and through an analysis of the material side of the trace of the Victorian past, objects and things in contemporary culture. The growing interest in objects and sensory experience in Victorian scholarship provides the broader context for a neo-Victorian burgeoning fascination with objects, bodies and the sense of touch. In her biography of the Brontë sisters, Lutz considers the objects that the sisters possessed and follows their lives through those objects and things present in their daily activities, some of them belonging to their childhood (the miniature, for instance). By paying a heightened attention to things, Lutz not only illuminates the Brontë sisters’ lives but also provides a nuanced reading into Victorian material culture. These Victorian traces prove the affective power invested upon objects and texts which clearly mediate between an absent Victorian past and a contemporary present; therefore, Lutz’s text (Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, also published in 2015) demonstrates the relevance of affective encounters with the past through collecting and the complex relationship between subject and object.