Poetic Exhibitions Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum

Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum offers an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relationship between British Romantic poetry and the rise of national museum culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a simultaneously theoretical and historical analysis, it studies a range of poetry and aesthetic philosophy in relation to the first hundred years of the British Museum, from its establishment in the 1750's to the completion of its current edifice in the 1850's. It thereby provides a sequence of aesthetic reflections on the various social, cultural, and imaginative challenges posed by this novel institution. In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poetic Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics. Both the museum and the nation it serves are realized imaginatively through an imperfect aesthetic accommodation of difference and identity. The museum's official statements of institutional purpose and curatorial design describe a harmonious relationship between an ennobling exhibition and a unified nation. However, accounts of the institution in the popular press, guidebooks to the sights of London, private correspondence, and parliamentary debates depict the museum as a touchstone for social and political conflict. In this fraught domain of national self-promotion, the language of aesthetics provides a nascent curatorial theory of material and cultural reconciliation. An emphasis on the pleasures of imagination grants the poet and spectator especially prominent positions in Romantic culture as both are newly empowered as active participants in the visual and conceptual creation of knowledge. As this role is made available to an ever-widening portion of the national public-including women and members of the working classes-both the nation and the museum develop past their original conceptual restraints into institutions with as much power to liberate and involve as to master and contain. Poetic Exhibitions seeks both to enrich the study of modern museums with the insights of literary theory and to establish a more practical connection between Romanticism and its attendant ideologies. By reading the aesthetic reflections of such writers as Joseph Addison, William Hogarth, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in relation to the exhibitionary plans and popular guidebooks for the early museum, Gidal demonstrates the connections between abstract theory and cultural politics. By reflecting upon the collections and the excavations of Sir Hans Sloane, Lord Elgin, Charles Towney, and Austen Henry Layard in relation to their institutional acquisition, he explores the poetics of national incorporation. By comparing the works of such poets as Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti alongside promotions and receptions of the national museum, he illustrates the connections between lyric expression and material exhibition. Throughout the book, he argues that the operative dialogue between aesthetics and ideology enables rather than obstructs critical reflection.