The Exhibit in the Text

Interest in collecting and museology has increased exponentially over recent years, both in academic circles and the broader cultural arena, but the relationship between museums, collections and literature has not yet been fully investigated. This book examines some crucial phases of this interaction from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moving from a time of endless enthusiasm for exhibiting and classifying to the modern period, dominated by turbulence and loss, the essays in this collection investigate changing modes of museology and literary texts that articulate the concepts of display and taxonomy. The writers in this volume move beyond the world of art to address cultural practices at large and demonstrate that the ‘museum fever’ of the past 150 years has been a powerful agent of textuality.
The focus of the book moves from the Victorian authors John Clare, Thomas De Quincey and George Eliot, via Henry James’s precociously modernist concerns, to the twentieth-century crisis of representation and memory embodied in the works of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett. The essays testify to the thematic and theoretical importance of the encounter between museum and text, which makes a lively comeback in post-modern narrative through the works of A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes and J.G. Farrell among others.