| Title |
Out of the closet, into the world: the power of puppets in Jessie Burton's "The Miniaturist" / |
| Translation of Title |
Kalvinizmas ir komercija: lėlės tropologija Jessie Burton romane Miniatiūristas. |
| Authors |
Šlapkauskaitė, Rūta |
| DOI |
10.15388/Litera.2019.4.8 |
| Full Text |
|
| Is Part of |
Literatūra.. Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. 2019, t. 61, Nr. 4, p. 101-121.. ISSN 1648-1143. eISSN 0258-0802 |
| Keywords [eng] |
puppet ; doll ; miniature ; object ; thing ; commodification ; Calvinist ethics ; subjectivity |
| Abstract [eng] |
The curiosity about toy-like objects in contemporary Anglophone literature, while part of a millennia-long human fascination with artificial life, also squares palpably with the material shift that took place in the humanities in the 1980s, reinvigorating the fields of history, anthropology, philosophy, and literature with a new concern for the world of things and material culture. The present paper employs the critical lens of the New Materialism, Thing Theory, and phenomenological reasoning to examine the tropological significance of sapient objects – both organic and man-made – in English author Jessie Burton’s historical novel The Miniaturist (2014). By highlighting the ways in which the narrative’s figural system negotiates the structural and conceptual dichotomies of human/doll, object/thing, interiority/exteriority, authenticity/artificiality, and mobility/stasis, this reading of Burton’s novel attempts to show how the literary text rethinks the social life of things and the ambiguity of subject-object relations in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. A critical emphasis on the fluidity of matter in The Miniaturist brings to light the invisible boundaries of human agency and the role of commodity capitalism in the genesis of modern subjectivity. |
| Published |
Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla |
| Type |
Journal article |
| Language |
English |
| Publication date |
2019 |
