ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates three thing-essays that respond to modernism and its disillusionments. Worn down by a Weberian disenchantment that reduces items to pure objecthood, G. K. Chesterton’s “Lamp-Posts” ( 1920 ) asks in the meta-reflective mode for a more poeticising look on quotidian things. J. B. Priestley’s meta-reflective “The Toy Farm” (1927) ponders on the adult fascination with a toy farm and on how reveries about a utopian unity between humans and non-human nature can temporarily overcome modern senses of alienation. Rose Macaulay’s “Arm-Chair” (1935) testifies to the author’s conflicted position in the so-called ‘battle of the brows’ and combines meta-reflective explications with associative reveries about the essayistic speaker’s own penchant for armchairs.
