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]
Twentieth-century examples include Ilya Ehrenburg's The Life of the Automobile (1929)[19] and E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes (1996).[20]
With works of Mary Ann Kilner of the 1780s, Adventures of a Pincushion and Memoirs of a Peg-Top, it-novels became part of children's literature.[21] One offshoot was a style of satirical children's verse made popular by Catherine Ann Dorset, based on a poem by William Roscoe, The Butterfly's Ball and The Grasshopper's Feast.[22] Quite generally, it-narrative in the 19th century is typified by an animal narrator.[23]
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.[24]
The plot of Middlemarch has been seen to be structured, initially, by a circulation; but to end in a contrasting "subject narrative".[25]
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.[26] 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."[26]