Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel - the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present - have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor. Luggage considers bags as carefully curated microcosms of our domestic and professional selves, charting the evolution of travel across literature, film, and art. A simple suitcase, it turns out, contains more than you might think. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Autorentext
Susan Harlan is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. She is the author of Memories of War in Early Modern England (2016) and has written for, among others, Literary Hub, The Guardian US, The Toast, Roads & Kingdoms, The Awl, The Bitter Southerner, The Morning News, Curbed, The Common, Nowhere, Public Books, Jezebel, and Atlas Obscura.
Inhalt
Introduction: Travel and Its Objects
1. Luggage and Secrets
2. The Language of Luggage
3. Packing
4. My Luggage
5. Lost Luggage: Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index