The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century(Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object-a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception.

In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.

About the Author :
Cynthia Sundberg Wall is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Review :
"Wall offers a valuable contribution to the history of the eighteenth-century novel. By reading novelistic prose in relation to other forms of contemporary prose, The Prose of Things weaves an intricate tapestry of texts that defined, celebrated, and required spatial description."--Tita Chico "Eighteenth-Century Fiction" "In The Prose of Things, Cynthia Wall takes up a topic that all of us who work in the field have touched upon but have not had the courage nor the ambition nor the vision to consider in just the way that she has done here. Her study is a rich and intense meditation, an examination of the various ways in which description is transformed and revalued through the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. Wall's scholarship is exemplary, rigorous, and comprehensive. This is a very careful book, speculative and even daring when it has to be, but always grounded in pertinent critical and scholarly discussions." --John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania--John Richetti "In this agile, exuberant, and important study, Cynthia Wall observes eighteenth-century British observers and, by reconstructing the changing ways in which they saw and in which they made their seeing legible, helps us to historicize modern habits of perception. The Prose of Things tells a new and absorbing story about the evolution of early modern prose as it tracks the literary and cultural ascent of description, the ascent that, by the nineteenth century--the heyday of the prosy, detail-thickened novel--had led to description's 'domestication' in narrative and its 'gentrification' in culture. Panoramic in scope, The Prose of Things is nonetheless unfailingly sensitive to details. That is only fitting for a book that will leave its readers with a new appreciation for the skillfulness and brio that enabled eighteenth-century writing to reimagine details into meaningfulness."--Deidre Shauna Lynch, Indiana University