「物質」：十九世紀文學和文化

MATERIAL: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Material is a broad term covering all aspects of the physical world and commodity culture. The nineteenth century is an era that teemed with things and material objects, both in the everyday life of people and in the discursive representations of the period. Accelerated industrialization, the advent of mass production, technological innovation, and retail and commercial developments led to a dramatic prominence of commodity culture to a scale unseen before. The Victorian middle class used conspicuous consumption and the fashionably decorated bodies of women to display wealth and status. The Victorian home crammed every possible space with bric-à-brac to showcase a “decorative semiotic economy” that privileges abundance and material numbers (Logan 26). The Victorian cities built vast auditoriums, department stores, museums and exhibition halls as spaces of commodity display dedicated to the circulation and consumption of things. There were so many new things and so many new words naming them, that a new class of words came into being, like “gadget, dingus, thingamajig, jigger” (Richards 2).