Finding Room for Things

This review of Cynthia Sundberg Wall's "The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century" (Chicago, 2006) notes that Walls' book traces changes in the description of objects in a wide range of works, including maps, diaries, catalogues, poems and especially novels. She argues that the description of things in their particularity demarcates changes in the representation of context and thus of significance itself. Yet questions about the historical representation of things challenge Wall's contention that description of things is a uniquely eighteenth-century phenomenon.