Romanticism and the Museum

"Romanticism and the Museum aims to establish the museum - like the ruin or Alpine landscape - as one of the most productive sites for Romantic authors' thinking. It argues that public museums were integral to Britain's understanding of itself as a nation confronting the challenges of the French Revolution. This monograph makes four inter-related literary case studies to trace how Romantic-era authors mediated potentially controversial ideas through museum artefacts and settings; it highlights museum imagery in Wordsworth, Scott, Edgeworth, and in literary periodicals featuring Byron and Horace Smith. This timely study is at the confluence of several powerful currents in Romantic studies: Romantic institutions; the turn to the aesthetic and the visual; sociability; collections and collecting. Peacocke draws on diverse print sources, such as museum catalogues and guidebooks, artists' biographies, visual art, and depictions of the new exhibition spaces, to amplify her literary analysis of Romantic visions of reshaping the nation. "--