The Author's Effects
On Writer's House Museums
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:16th Jan '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Paperback£20.00(9780198883548)
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. It 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, Brontë'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 Arquà, 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.
Oxford University Press has produced a handsome illustrated volume that holds much to engage and instruct a literate reader interested in cultural heritage and European and North American literatures ... Watson has an eye for vivid and since-forgotten topics such as the poet Cowper's nightcap, so famous that it became a kind of icon in a poem by Browning, and the theme of headgear leads us to Jo's writing cap in Little Women and Ibsen's top hat on display in Oslo. Watson spins museological gold from the mundane (massively plural) accretions of writerly lives and readerly immersion. * Alison Booth, Scholar's Lab, University of Virginia, Biography *
This smart, well-written book will attract a wide audience through its seamless grafting of literary history, material culture, and museum studies. Highly recommended. All readers. * M. Frank, University of Massachusetts Lowell, CHOICE *
...an engaging journey through Authorland in nine chapters... her [Watson's] writing has the capacity to make us think on more detailed ways about the institutions of literary tourism * Bill Bell, Literary Review *
Watson is an assured and intuitive guide to the perhaps slightly introspective world of the writer's house museum. She knows the literature well (there are 92 pages of notes and bibliography to 231 pages of text) and her awareness of critical theory does not come at the cost of clarity of expression. It is a broad-ranging, thoughtful and informative book. * Stephen Clarke, The Johnsonian News Letter *
The Author's Effects engagingly insists that we attend to the presence and particularity of its examples, that we share Watson's fascination with the ability of each to "effect" the author it evokes. * LuAnn McCracken Fletcher, Cedar Crest College , Review 19 *
ISBN: 9780198847571
Dimensions: 236mm x 160mm x 25mm
Weight: 720g
350 pages