Introduction

After reflecting on the increased interest in the literary essay and questions of materiality within the last years, this introduction gives a short explanation why essays are particularly suitable for literary representations of human relationships to material items and points to a corpus of British and Anglo-Irish literary essays that have done exactly that but have so far not been investigated as a joint group of texts. Introducing the term ‘thing-essay’, I underline the need for a more systematic description of these texts. In a second step, I outline the scope and structure of the book, which consists of three theoretical and five historical chapters.