ABSTRACT
bric-a-brac is a vernacular term, probably coined in Paris in the early nineteenth century, and seems to have entered both the French and English literary languages in the 1840s. Bric-a-brac, both in terms of content and as a description of the relationship between content and form, is key to our understanding of Victorian literature. Henry James, in the 1870s and 1880s, was a lone American voice crying out for the priority of composition and design. 'Details', 'fragments', 'queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary': here are the qualities of bric-a-brac, not just as a matter of content, but inscribed into the technical practice of nineteenth-century writing. James MacPherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language in 1760. 'Fragment' was a familiar term in German writing from the 1760s onwards, thanks to Herder, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.
