Romanticism and the museum
By: Emma Peacocke, Research Assistant, Carleton University, Canada
Series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 195
ISBN-13: 9781137471437
Subjects: Romanticism; Museums; Influence; English literature; History and criticism; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Description: "Romanticism and the Museum aims to establish the museum - like the ruin or Alpine landscape - as one of the most productive sites for Romantic authors' thinking. It argues that public museums were integral to Britain's understanding of itself as a nation confronting the challenges of the French Revolution. This monograph makes four inter-related literary case studies to trace how Romantic-era authors mediated potentially controversial ideas through museum artefacts and settings; it highlights museum imagery in Wordsworth, Scott, Edgeworth, and in literary periodicals featuring Byron and Horace Smith. This timely study is at the confluence of several powerful currents in Romantic studies: Romantic institutions; the turn to the aesthetic and the visual; sociability; collections and collecting. Peacocke draws on diverse print sources, such as museum catalogues and guidebooks, artists' biographies, visual art, and depictions of the new exhibition spaces, to amplify her literary analysis of Romantic visions of reshaping the nation.  "--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 162-180) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: List of IllustrationsIntroduction1. Changing the Subject: Aesthetic Displacement, Museum Display, and the French Revolution in The Prelude2. Facing History: Galleries and Portraits in Waverley's Historiography3. Reframing the National Imagination in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington4. Carving Out the Public Sphere: Romantic Literary Periodicals and the Elgin MarblesEpilogueBibliographyIndex.