Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophuls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

What is the connection between philosophical enquiries and storytelling in contemporary narrative? Is it possible to outline some features of a so-called philosophical fiction in Western literature throughout the last two centuries? This book aims to provide a plural answer, hosting extensive essays by seven young researchers coming from different fields (Theory of literature, German, American, Russian and Italian contemporary literature, history and evolution of the essayistic form). A short The volume is addressed to all those with a strong interest in both evolution of philosophical speech and history of the novel and has a strong vocation to promote interdisciplinarity in literary studies.

Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies - a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as "memory", "fragmentation", "desire", "genre", "authorship", and "censorship".