Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Cooke, Jr., Edward

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, it-narratives emerged as a new literary genre, elevating objects to the role of heroes and heroines. Investing fictional objects with the power to participate in human affairs, these stories offer insight into how the contemporaneous reading public grappled with the agency of objects in real life. Responding to questions about agency and subjectivity provoked within the early modern it-narrative, this dissertation considers how actual objects made and used within an ever-widening world of material goods were “speaking” to people in new ways, both exciting and disconcerting. Defining these “speaking” things as “articulate objects,” the research suggests new ways to “read” them, first by untangling their form and decoration from the intentions of the maker, but also by closer analysis of the possibilities and limitations inherent within the materials themselves. Four unique objects are considered; each communicates, through self-reflexive decoration, how and by whom it should be used. The first is a seventeenth-century Mexican lebrillo with a first-person inscription, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The second object is a needlework sampler crafted by Pauline Fortier at the Ursuline convent school in early nineteenth-century New Orleans, now owned by The Historic New Orleans Collection. Next, we explore a mahogany card table from the Chipstone collection, brought to life by a trompe l’oeil needlework cover. A redware tea canister with sgraffito decoration in the Yale University Art Gallery is the final object. A cross-section of related artifacts, documentary material, images, and literature supports the interpretation of these articulate objects, offering insight into how they intersected with the world of eighteenth century letters. The framework of the articulate object reveals how “things” possessed their own specific kinds of communicative agency and authority, and marks material literacy as a powerful and pervasive intellectual current that shaped early American life.

Download

Share

COinS