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.

The Editors: Caroline Patey is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Milan. She has published full-length volumes on Joyce and Proust, Mannerism and London and Henry James (Londra: Henry James e la capitale del modern; 2004). She has recently co-edited Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006) and the Italian translation of John Soane’s Crude Hints Towards a History of my House (2009). Laura Scuriatti is Assistant Professor of Literature at the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin. She has published articles on Mina Loy, H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Sacheverell Sitwell and contemporary art. She also edited Berlin Babylon (2005), an anthology of contemporary German literature.

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