<i>Grand Designs: Labor, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture</i>, by Lara Kriegel

hill, kate

doi:10.2979/vic.2008.50.4.681

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Noah Heringman (2013) addresses the labor of antiquarianism that produced collections, as does Virginia Zimmerman (2008), who also considers how antiquarian disciplines (like geology and archaeology) informed collecting. Broader concerns such as industrialism influenced not only museum access but also aesthetics, as Lara Kriegel (2007), Amy Woodson‐Boulton (2012), and Giles Waterfield (2015) have shown. Populations accessing exhibits were not homogenous, and they therefore interacted with museum form in diverse ways.…”

Section: Museum Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Narrative techniques that developed in nineteenth‐century museums (what Lara Kriegel calls “strategies of showing,” 2007, p. 123) still operate today. Reading museums in and through literature helps show how the museum functions as a form in addition to a literal place and an abstract idea.…”

Section: Teaching Museumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 5 For example, Gidal's Poetic Exhibitions (Gidal, 2001) begins by describing the British Museum's iconography and then shows how that institution developed alongside Romantic aesthetics and Kriegel's Grand Designs (2007) analyzes the close relationship between Victorian aesthetics and industry. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reading the museum

Chappell

2023

Literature Compass

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The museum is not a neutral container, a passive collection of art and artifacts. Rather the museum is itself a historical argument, using objects and their relations to write our collective stories. This essay shows how the museum, as it developed within nineteenth‐century European imperialism, directs meaning both within and beyond literature. The museum integrates readers into its collections and its narratives, directing them figuratively and literally through exhibits. Nineteenth‐century literature, I argue, capitalizes on this dynamic interplay among the collection, the viewing subject, and the museum's ideologies. In both poetry and prose the museum appears as a place, a concept, and a form. For example, William Thackeray's “May Day Ode” shows how the Crystal Palace and the 1851 Great Exhibition facilitate an imperialist agenda. The galleries in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, meanwhile, are not just places the characters go; they also exert control over how characters (and readers) experience and evaluate collections. Across these texts, the museum is setting and theme. But, I argue, the museum also works as form, curating the collections, the characters who visit them, and the readers who access the narrative through museum logics. In conjunction with literary examples and an overview of scholarly conversations around nineteenth‐century museum studies, I consider how the museum continues to direct bodies, interpretations, and ideas today by drawing on my experiences using museums in the college classroom.

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Section: Museum Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Teaching Museumsmentioning

confidence: 99%