Obsolete objects in the literary imagination : ruins, relics, rarities, rubbish, uninhabited places, and hidden treasures / Francesco Orlando ; translated from the Italian by Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel, with the collaboration of Alessandra Grego ; foreword by David Quint.
Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis". Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional object...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via ProQuest) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Other title: | Oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura. English. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English Italian |
| Published: |
New Haven :
Yale University Press,
©2006.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis". Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialisation, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature in our culture, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xvii, 500 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-480) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780300138214 0300138210 9786611728915 6611728910 |
| Language: | English. |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Print version record. |