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This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and consuming objects offers a context in which boundaries between people and things become uncertain, with objects seemingly exercising a disturbing agency. Marsh’s texts present mutually transforming encounters between objects and characters that question the stability of identity. The chapter suggests that whilst transgressing boundaries between self and not-self is often explored in critical analysis through mesmerism, a more appropriate conceptual framework for Marsh is provided by object relations psychoanalysis, and specifically Christopher Bollas’s notion of ‘transformational objects’. Developing this notion in relation to Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, the chapter identifies Marsh’s objects as ‘transformational things’, encounters with which often lead to terrifying breakdowns of selfhood, conveying a pervasive sense of existential horror and exposing the precariousness of late-nineteenth-century identity.

This chapter provides a conceptual bridge between contemporary thing theories, which champion the aesthetic products of the creative misuse of objects, and new materialisms, which use the same activities as a means of understanding and resisting the negative effects of consumerism under late capitalism. The thing theories of Martin Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Ken Alder maintain that the aesthetic “thing” comes into being when an object breaks down and can no longer fulfill its standard function. Through an extended reading of the failed Apollo 13 mission, the chapter shows how this idea was redirected to critique what Evan Watkins calls the “technoideological” culture of late capitalism. While a similar shift from aesthetics to political practice informs twenty-first-century maker communities and environmental activist groups, the chapter shows how the practitioners of these activities often operate instead as champions of late capitalism and clear manifestations of its dominant politics.

What sort of thing is a text analysis tool and how does it bear theory? The ninth chapter looks at how things like models or demonstration devices can be used to share theories. This helps us understand theories about text tools from concordances to interactive visualizations. We return to John B. Smith and his ideas about computer criticism and visualization. We also look at Stephen Ramsay to present a model theory of text analysis as play. Tools bear interpretative baggage or rules that constrain and open how you can enter into a playful dialogue with a text. We then look at how tools like models and instruments bear theory we can speculate about how they can be better designed to be open themselves to interpretation. We close with the principles we followed building Voyant so that it is open to use and interpretation.

Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ Crystal Palace in the heart of Britain. A new and innovative architectural form, the palace and its contents challenged the viewer’s vision, judgement, and sense of scale to such an extent that recourse was made to the language of magic in an effort to represent its unfamiliar effects. The palace and the objects it contained had apparently materialised like the stuff of dreams. Within this transformative space, the magnificence of Britain’s industrial resources became truly apparent only by way of comparison, by the jostling together of old and new, of fictional and material, and of machinery and magic. Here, an anxious meta-narrative emerged about the nature of modern production and consumption. Casting those products originating from India, China and elsewhere within a framework of magic and the Arabian Nights was, this chapter argues, a part of the rhetoric of British modernity, which made the comparison between nations and their wares more palatable by insisting that supposedly ‘inferior’ nations had employed the agency of magic. Such a narrative generated wonder both for the beautiful, often hand-crafted productions that had supposedly been wrought by magic, and of the advancements of British civilisation, which had apparently gained, through science, all the powers of Aladdin’s lamp.

Using Bill Brown’s “thing theory” and Jane Bennett’s materialist theory, Ann D’Orazio analyzes how objects such as tea, tomatoes, trees, and the hijab function as nonhuman agents in Sacco’s Palestine, endowing the text with a powerful depth and resonance.

Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.

In Chapter 3, Tsang Tsou-choi—named “one of the oldest graffiti artists in the world” by the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003—comes into the picture. As a self-proclaimed “king” since the 1950s, Tsang spent decades writing his family’s “(hi)stories” on different surfaces in the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from walls, lampposts and post boxes to electricity boxes. Alongside the writings he produced and the places he reinvented in the city, the connection Tsang made with the local territory and local history is examined in this chapter as a confluence of local relations which reverberate and fluctuate on their own according to different footprints and traces Tsang left in the city and in the mind of his fellow urban dwellers.

The Introduction sets out the main focal points of the book and situates these in their critical and theoretical contexts before providing a brief overview of the chapters that follow. This study aims to demonstrate the many ways that the medieval book functions in the real world in the past and in the present: as an object to be used and venerated, engaged with, collected, traded, and fragmented. The book centres on the idea that at all times in its long life, a book can be thought of as ‘whole’, and that it is only through observing and analysing this wholeness that readers and scholars can hope to access the full interpretative potential of the medieval book as a significant witness to the human experience.

It is now well known that there is a spectrum of views about humans and the world they live in, ranging from the concept of the environment as an external force to the idea that people exist through a series of relations which it makes little sense to divide up as culture on the one hand and nature on the other. It is worth thinking through the implications of these varied views briefly (although I do not want to duplicate Davies’s detailed introduction in Chapter 1), so that we can think about what is lost and gained when trying to combine nature and culture, my main aim in current work. Let us start with views in which there is a radical separation of people and the physical world. In such views, which are in themselves varied, the physical world is seen as a series of energy budgets and nutrients that people have to extract in the most cost-efficient way possible in order to maintain life. Leslie White (1949) made a three-fold division between the physical, the biological, and the cultural. Academic study, in which physicists, chemists, or earth scientists probe the physical state of the universe, biologists investigate living things, and the social sciences and humanities focus on the human world, was not constructed around a series of heuristic divisions, but instead mirrored reality, White argued. Culture was also divided into three levels, of which the first, technology determined social organization and ideology. The primary function of culture for White was the harnessing of energy and the more efficiently this was done, the more it allowed for organizational complexity and multiple ideologies. Human history moved by revolutions in energy capture from early periods in which human muscles were key, to the agricultural revolution where plants and animals were domesticated to increase food supplies and animals could be used for traction, through to the industrial revolution (and the possibility of a future nuclear revolution) (see also Armstrong Oma, Chapter 11 this volume).