"a complex and fascinating story...a memorable book that is indispensable for readers interested in the study of consumer culture and in the connection between realism and cultural production in the nineteenth century." L'Esprit Createur

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The bibelot: a nineteenth-century object; 2. The logic(s) of material culture: imitation, accumulation, and mobility; 3. The fashionable artistic interior: social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere; 4. Flaubert's 'Musées reçus': Bouvard and Pécuchet's consumerist epistemology; 5. Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans; 6. The parlour of critical theory: Reading dwelling space across disciplines; 7. Rearranging the Oedipus: fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

"a complex and fascinating story...a memorable book that is indispensable for readers interested in the study of consumer culture and in the connection between realism and cultural production in the nineteenth century." L'Esprit Createur

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The bibelot: a nineteenth-century object; 2. The logic(s) of material culture: imitation, accumulation, and mobility; 3. The fashionable artistic interior: social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere; 4. Flaubert's 'Musées reçus': Bouvard and Pécuchet's consumerist epistemology; 5. Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans; 6. The parlour of critical theory: Reading dwelling space across disciplines; 7. Rearranging the Oedipus: fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

"a complex and fascinating story...a memorable book that is indispensable for readers interested in the study of consumer culture and in the connection between realism and cultural production in the nineteenth century." L'Esprit Createur

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The bibelot: a nineteenth-century object; 2. The logic(s) of material culture: imitation, accumulation, and mobility; 3. The fashionable artistic interior: social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere; 4. Flaubert's 'Musées reçus': Bouvard and Pécuchet's consumerist epistemology; 5. Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans; 6. The parlour of critical theory: Reading dwelling space across disciplines; 7. Rearranging the Oedipus: fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde; Notes; Bibliography; Index.