ABSTRACT
This conclusion summarises the main insights of the study and looks on related questions for future research. The study shows that thing-essays semanticise material items in many different ways – poeticising, sentimentalising them or instrumentalising them politically. While their thematic and formal openness thus renders them expressions of authors’ individual cosmoses, trends in thing-essays are still indicative for wider cultural perceptions of objects. Further questions that can be explored include, e.g., in how far my typology of three modes applies to essays in general, how the genesis of British thing-essays is related to the evolution of kindred genres like the thing-poem or the it-narrative and why certain periods are characterised by a relative absence of thing-essays.
