Research Catalog

The author's effects : on writer's house museums

Title
The author's effects : on writer's house museums / Nicola J. Watson.
Author
Watson, Nicola J., 1958-
Publication
Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library JFE 20-4191Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description
xii, 336 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
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. 0It 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, Bronte'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 Arqua, 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.
Subjects
Genre/Form
History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
Call Number
JFE 20-4191
ISBN
  • 0198847572
  • 9780198847571
  • 9780192586827 (canceled/invalid)
OCLC
1105321255
Author
Watson, Nicola J., 1958- author.
Title
The author's effects : on writer's house museums / Nicola J. Watson.
Publisher
Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020.
Edition
First edition.
Type of Content
text
still image
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Research Call Number
JFE 20-4191
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