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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $44.00

Format:
Hardback
368 pp.
24 illustrations, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198847571

Publication date:
February 2020

Imprint: OUP UK


The Author's Effects

On Writer's House Museums

Nicola J. Watson

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.

Readership : Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly and General: Academics, students and general readers interested in nineteenth-century literature and culture, life-writing, authorial afterlives, authorial celebrity, and literary commemoration. Specialists and practitioners working in literary museums.

Introduction
1. Remains: Burns' skull and Keats' hair
2. Bodies: Petrarch's cat and Poe's Raven
3. Clothing: Brontë's bonnet and Dickinson's dress
4. Furniture: Shakespeare's chair and Austen's desk
5. Household Effects: Johnson's coffee-pot and Twain's effigy
6. Glass: Woolf's spectacles and Freud's mirror
7. Outhouses: Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' prison
8. Enchanted Ground: Scott's Abbotsford, Irving's Sunnyside, Shakespeare's New Place
9. Exit through the Gift-shop

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Nicola J. Watson trained at Oxford and held posts at Oxford, Harvard, Northwestern, and Indiana Universities before taking up a position at the Open University. A specialist in the literature and culture of the Romantic period, her research focusses on authorial afterlives and the associated histories of literary tourism, literary commemoration, and the literary museum.

Making Sense - Margot Northey
Baroque between the Wars - Jane Stevenson
Scents and Sensibility - Catherine Maxwell
Homes and Haunts - Alison Booth

Special Features

  • The only book about the emergence of the writer's house museum as a distinct cultural formation and convention.
  • Considers the writer's house museum as a form of literary biography crucial to the construction and maintenance of authorial celebrity.
  • Explores how imaginative literature has produced the celebrity of physical objects and places.
  • Generously illustrated throughout.