Te Hao Nui. The Great Catch. Object Stories from Te Manawa

Abstract

If biography is second only to fiction in the latest New Zealand bestseller lists, object biography too has achieved a renaissance. Eighteenth-century 'it narratives' with their tales of 'babbling banknotes, canting coins, prosing pocket watches and soliloquizing snuffboxes' gave way in the nineteenth-century to fictionalized autobiographies of anthropomorphized talking books travelling, often tragi-comically, from one owner and one mise-en-scene to the next.