Common Objects: Literary Materialism and the Early American Novel

Inspired by the recent material turn in literary studies, this essay asks two questions: What kind of “real” objects populate early American novels, and what do passing references to items like spoons, gloves, or chairs really do? In contrast to critical discussions that privilege things, this essay invokes Roland Barthes’s “cultural rules of representation” to reprise our understanding of the form and function of insignificant objects in novels published between 1780 and 1820. Engaging with over twenty novels, the essay examines the quantitative and qualitative properties of literary objects at the intersection of print culture and a dual material literacy that is at once founded on the readers’ sensory knowledge of objects and intimately paired with the readers’ ability to comprehend objects when signified by word. By focusing on the textual forms of the shop catalog, probate inventory, and object sample, the essay argues that ordinary object references enable early novels to participate in a much-overlooked but common method of communication, in which print-mediated objects acted as material signs and prototypical settings while also testing the conceptual ties that linked the period’s emerging commodity culture to the literary form of the novel.