Type of narrative work centered around an object's use over time
The novel of circulation, otherwise known as the it-narrative, or object narrative,[1] is a genre of novel common at one time in British literature, and follows the fortunes of an object, for example a coin, that is passed around between different owners. Sometimes, instead, it involves a pet or other domestic animal, as for example in Francis Coventry's The History of Pompey the Little (1751).[2] This and other such works blended satire with the interest for contemporary readers of a roman à clef.[3] They also use objects such as hackney-carriages and bank-notes to interrogate what it meant to live in an increasingly mobile society, and to consider the effect of circulation on human relations.[4]
1709 Charles Gildon, The Golden Spy has been regarded by modern scholars as "the first, fully-fledged it-narrative in English".[5] But for his contemporaries, it tends to be read as "a Menippean satire, a re-adaptation of Apuleius's The Golden Ass and a sequel to The New Metamorphosis [i.e. Gildon's adaptation of The Golden Ass in 1708]".[6] Later, an episodic structure in which objects "spied" on people became established.[7] Other generic terms used are "object tales" or "spy novels".[8]
1734 Anonymous, The Secret History of an Old Shoe[9]
It has been remarked that the slave narrative genre of the 18th century avoided being confused with the it-narrative, being thought of as a type of biography.[25]
The plot of Middlemarch has been seen to be structured, initially, by a circulation; but to end in a contrasting "subject narrative".[26]
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have argued that one popular form of hyperlink cinema, a genre of film characterized by intersecting and multilinear plots, constitutes a contemporary form of it-narrative.[27] In these films, they argue, "the narrative link is the characters' relation to the film's product of choice, whether it be guns, cocaine, oil, or Nile perch."[27]
^Ewers, Chris (2018). Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. Boydell and Brewer. p. 101-102.
^Jonathan Lamb (2001), 'Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales', Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), pp. 133–66, reprinted in Bill Brown (ed.), Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 193–226 (p. 213).
^Jingyue Wu (2017), '"Nobilitas sola est atq; unica Virtus": Spying and the Politics of Virtue in The Golden Spy; or, A Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments (1709)', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40:2 (2017), pp. 237–53 doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12412