Susan Harlan crafts essays that explore the intricate connections between place, memory, and the objects that surround us. Her writing delves into feminist issues and sharp satire, often examining how physical spaces and material possessions shape our identities and reflect our histories. Harlan's prose is characterized by its wit and profound insights into the fabric of everyday life.
Introduction: Travel and Its Objects 1. Luggage and Secrets 2. The Language of Luggage 3. Packing 4. My Luggage 5. Lost Luggage: Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes Index
From Lady Macbeth's favourite room in the castle, to Lizzy Bennet's vision of Pemberly, this delightfully satirical book brings literary backdrops to the foreground by reimagining characters as homeowners who reveal their tastes in interiors The Bookseller
Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare
This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.