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"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. "--
List of contents
List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Changing the Subject: Aesthetic Displacement, Museum Display, and the French Revolution in The Prelude 2. Facing History: Galleries and Portraits in Waverley's Historiography 3. Reframing the National Imagination in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington 4. Carving Out the Public Sphere: Romantic Literary Periodicals and the Elgin Marbles Epilogue Bibliography Index
About the author
Emma Rosalind Peacocke completed her doctorate at Carleton University. Her publications include articles in the European Romantic Review and Thomas Moore: Texts, Contexts, Hypertext. She has held a Huntington Junior Fellowship, and a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship.
