Writers' Houses and the Making of Memory


Book Description

This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers’ houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author’s private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.




Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914)


Book Description

Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarm?and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-si?e France - and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of 'at home' photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual, literary, and material cultures.




Transforming Author Museums


Book Description

Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies centered not only on biography, but also literary texts, imagined spaces, different readers, historical contexts, architectural concepts, and artistic interventions. As this volume shows, the changing of spaces asks how literary museums create new ways of interlinking real and literary spaces, texts, objects, readers, and tourists.




Homes and Haunts


Book Description

This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.




National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe


Book Description

In National Poets, Cultural Saints Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason explore the ways in which certain artists, writers, and poets in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory, emulating the symbolic role formerly played by state rulers and religious saints. The authors develop the concept of cultural sainthood in the context of nationalism as a form of invisible religion, identify major shifts in canonization practices from antiquity to the nationally-motivated commemoration of the nineteenth century, and explore the afterlives of two national poets, Slovenia's France Prešeren and Iceland's Jónas Hallgrímsson. The book presents a useful analytical model of canonization for further studies on cultural sainthood and opens up fruitful perspectives for the understanding of national movements.




Charleston and Monk's House


Book Description

The interwoven biographies of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the houses they lived in. What can we learn from a commemorative house? What biographical narratives emerge as we travel through the spaces of another's home? This new study unveils the revelatory potential of the house museum to inform and enrich our understanding of the lived past of its former inhabitants. It focuses on the emotionally textured interiors of Charleston and Monk's House, the literary/artistic house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, seeking out traces of their shared biography.Fresh perspectives unfold on Woolf's and Bell's' sisterhood and their continuous artistic exchange, as we shadow their daily lives through the richly painted rooms and atmospheric gardens of their former Sussex homes. Discover these celebrated artists in a different light - animated, moving, handling the tools of their related arts and brought vividly to life through the tangible fabric of their past living.




Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international ‘English’ in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices. It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemoration was a major force in the invention of transnational ‘English’ literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collection brings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.




The Author's Effects


Book Description

The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer's house museum, The Author's Effects anatomises the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer's bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer's house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns' skull, Keats' hair, Petrarch's cat, Poe's raven, Brontë's bonnet, Dickinson's dress, Shakespeare's chair, Austen's desk, Woolf's spectacles, Hawthorne's window, Freud's mirror, Johnson's coffee-pot and Bulgakov's stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologised themselves and their work—Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' tower, Scott's Abbotsford and Irving's Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch's Arquà, Rousseau's Ile St Pierre, and Shakespeare's Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare's New Place for 2016.




Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson's Circle


Book Description

Tennyson experienced at first hand the all-pervasive nature of celebrity culture. It caused him to retreat from the eyes of the world. This book delineates Tennyson's reluctant celebrity and its effects on his writings, on his coterie of famous and notable friends and on the ever-expanding, media-led circle of Tennyson's admirers.




Museums and Biographies


Book Description

Exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, this collection of essays examines examples from the early 19th century to the present day.