Portable Property
Victorian Culture on the Move
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12553744 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Talia Schaffer (0000-0001-8168-5117, City University of New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 307-310 |
| Publication date | 2010-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Victorian Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1355-5502 • E-ISSN: 1750-0133 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13555502.2010.491671 |
| OpenAlex | W2003000252 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
I am very fond of Wemmick, but in this case I have to concede that he has done John Plotz a disservice. By delivering his immortal paean to ‘portable property’, Wemmick gave Plotz an irresistiable title phrase that may lead readers to expect a very different kind of book. This brilliant, stirring, exciting new piece of criticism should really have had a title like ‘invested identity’. It is a bold reconsideration of how Victorian writers conceptualized identity – regional, national, psychological and realist identity – across their century and their empire. It offers fresh readings of famous texts and compelling accounts of unknown ones. It just does not happen to be about property, or portability. Rather, what it concerns is, in Plotz's words, ‘understanding Englishness as a moveable whole’ (p. 173). This is the central argument of Portable Property: ‘the innovative Victorian conception of dematerialized portability (that is, the notion that abstract concepts like Englishness, race, or familial heritage can become metaphorically portable by being incarnated in crucial objects) allows physically portable objects to bear both national and familial heritage with them into Greater Britain’ (p. 46). In other words, the Victorians came up with the idea of investing identificatory qualities (like Englishness, race, family) in objects. ‘Objects’ needs to be understood loosely, for it includes such formations as quotations, letters, bodies, and perceptions
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Empire · Epistemology · Identity (music · Literature · National identity · Political science · Politics · Property (philosophy · Sociology · Software portability · Computer Science · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2024 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |