Recent materialist literary criticism has freed the fictional object from its old duties―simulating verisimilitude or standing in for commodity―and illuminated the structural, affective, and aesthetic roles of things in literature. But these newly visible objects are not easily interpolated into existing critical frameworks because they are nei…[Read more]

Editor’s note: The interdisciplinary movement known as the material turn underpins Dr. Jesse Bordwin’s examination of Éilis Ní Dhuibne’s 1990 novel The Bray House. The very premise of the novel lends it to such analysis: The Bray House is ostensibly an account of a future archaeological excavation of a twentieth-century Irish home after nucle…[Read more]