Contemplating the aesthetic and narrative forms of material life in American fiction as well as theoretical concepts of materiality, The Literary Life of Things looks at renewed attention to the physical world within the humanities and social sciences, variously designated as new materialism or the material turn. Setting out from the observation that objects have a much-neglected life in fiction, Babette Barbel Tischleder aims to bring scenes of animation to the forefront and, by focusing on the trajectories of inanimate things, to ask how human aspirations, fantasies, practices, memories, and self-concepts rely upon the object world in American literature and culture.