Contents -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, -- Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory -- I The Stories Things Tell -- The Spirit of Things -- The Rape of the Lock as Still Life -- Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions -- Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility -- II Approaching It-Narratives -- It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre -- Britannia's Rule and the It-Narrator -- Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction -- Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration -- Occupying Works: Animated Objects and Literary Property -- Circulating Anti-Semitism: Charles Johnstone's Chrysal -- Corkscrews and Courtesans: Sex and Death in Circulation Novels -- It-Narratives: Fictional Point of View and Constructing the Middle Class -- III It-Narratives in Transition -- The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Object Narratives -- Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value -- Contributors -- Index.