Abrams, RobertChance, Maia Storm2020-04-302020-04-302020-04-302020Chance_washington_0250E_21296.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/45486Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020“Objects on the Margins”: How Things Make Persons and Worlds in Nineteenth-Century United States Writing examines how nonhuman things make and unmake persons and worlds in mid-nineteenth-century United States writing. I am interested in how subjects constitute themselves by making objects, and I am equally interested in moments in which things that resist classification as objects dismantle, invert, or evade the received subject-object paradigm. My central contention is that nonhuman things can structure personhood and worlds, rather than merely the reverse. As a result, my reading method is to attend to material specificity and praxis rather than to ideological signification. I find texts clamoring with things that, far from being flat stage props or working-class stand-ins for more glamorous ideologies, are things that behave.application/pdfen-USnoneAmerican literatureEnglishThesis