On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums

Fraser, Hilary; Black, Barbara J.

doi:10.2307/3509099

Cited by 20 publications

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“…After the British defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the British Museum adopted a similar symbiotic relationship to the imperial mission, as Jonah Siegel (2010) has explored. Barbara Black argues that “most curators of the age readily acknowledged that it was Britain's imperial obligation to collect in order to exhibit,” and she examines what she terms the “museum culture” of the Victorian period (Black, 2000, p. 12 and 5) 6 . Some of the most enduring debates regarding the British Museum's nineteenth‐century acquisitions have occurred around the so‐called “Elgin Marbles,” a collection of ancient Greek artifacts.…”

Section: Museum Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The conversations I include here are not an exhaustive account of nineteenth‐century museum scholarship but rather indicate how political and aesthetic conversations build on and through each other, especially in the context of empire. I specifically highlight work that considers how the “museum seemed democratic in ethos” while simultaneously “generat[ing] new oppressions in its wake” (Black, 2000, p. 11). Confronting these seeming contradictions helps us reckon with the political functions of our cultural heritage and analyze how we continue to shape identity through the past.…”

Section: Museum Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…9 9 On the museums in Middlemarch , see Michie (2007); on Wells's museum, see Black (2000, pp. 175–80). …”

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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: Museum Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%