Reading Commodities
An Introduction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23477385 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caitlin Vandertop (University of Warwick), Sudesh Mishra |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-28 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Commodities and Literature (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/9781009432344.001 |
| OpenAlex | W4415178232 |
| ISBN | 9781009432344 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of characters and the trajectories of plots. The pursuit of whale oil, for example, motivates the events of Moby-Dick , just as ivory and opium shape those of Heart of Darkness and Sea of Poppies , respectively. Yet whether commodities appear as background details or as protagonists in their own right, their presence invites us to connect the desires and domestic intimacies detailed in the text to the wider networks of production and circulation that frame them.
Circulation (fluid dynamics) · Feature (linguistics) · Frame (networking) · Narrative · Reading (process) · Whale · Australian History and Society · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade
Re-mapping World Literature
A Sense of Things
Forget English!
The Social Life of Things
Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities
The Empire Inside
The point is to change it”
Dockside Reading
The Disposition of Nature
Ecologies of cotton
What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism
Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties
Vibrant Matter
The Thing Itself
Thing Theory
Signs Taken for Wonders
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |