Afterword: What Do We Mean by "Material"?

What do the authors of this collection mean when they use the word "material"? In this afterword, I disentangle two distinct meanings which have found their way into the ECF special issue "Material Fictions," and which speak to two traditions of material thinking in academic discourse. The first, associated with "material" as an adjective, I call physicalist, tracing debts to philosophical materialisms, including Marxist historical materialism. The second, associated with "materials" in the plural, I call alchemical, which names an ongoing interest in the properties of physical media. Both of these traditions are with us still, but scholars of the eighteenth century are suited to weigh in because the first century of the modern era was importantly invested in each. I conclude with a few thoughts on how these traditions might be knitted together, citing attempts in this collection towards exactly this aim.