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In the quiet halls of the natural history museum, there are some creatures still alive with stories, whose personalities refuse to be relegated to the dusty corners of an exhibit. The fame of these beasts during their lifetimes has given them an iconic status in death. More than just museum specimens, these animals have attained a second life as historical and cultural records. This collection of essaysfrom a broad array of contributors, including anthropologists, curators, fine artists, geographers, historians, and journalistscomprises short "biographies" of a number of famous taxidermized animals. Each essay traces the life, death, and museum "afterlife" of a specific creature, illuminating the overlooked role of the dead beast in the modern human-animal encounter through practices as disparate as hunting and zookeeping. The contributors offer fresh examinations of the many levels at which humans engage with other animals, especially those that function as both natural and cultural phenomena, including Queen Charlottes pet zebra, Maharajah the elephant, and Balto the sled dog, among others. Readers curious about the enduring fascination with animals who have attained these strange afterlives will be drawn to the individual narratives within each essay, while learning more about the scientific, cultural, and museological contexts of each subject. Ranging from autobiographical to analytical, the contributors varying styles make this delightful book a true menagerie.Contributors: Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Royal College of Surgeons * Sophie Everest, University of Manchester * Kate Foster * Michelle Henning, University of the West of England, Bristol * Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow * Garry Marvin, Roehampton University, London * Henry Nicholls * Hannah Paddon * Merle Patchett * Christopher Plumb, University of Manchester * Rachel Poliquin * Jeanne Robinson, Glasgow Museums * Mike Rutherford, University of the West Indies * Richard C. Sabin, Natural History Museum * Richard Sutcliffe, Glasgow Museums * Geoffrey N. Swinney, University of Edinburgh

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Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice

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The debate over the value of community-based environmental collaboration is one that dominates current discussions of the management of public lands and other resources. In Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, the volumes contributors offer an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to this collaborative mode. The authors address the new institutional roles adopted by community-based collaborators and their interaction with existing governance institutions in order to achieve more holistic solutions to complex environmental challenges.Contributors:Heidi L. Ballard, University of California, Davis * Juliana E. Birkhoff, RESOLVE * Charles Curtin, Antioch University * Cecilia Danks, University of Vermont * E. Franklin Dukes, University of Virginia and George Mason University * Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, Colorado State University * Karen E. Firehock, University of Virginia * Melanie Hughes McDermott, Rutgers University * William D. Leach, California State University, Sacramento * Margaret Ann Moote, private consultant * Susan L. Senecah, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry * Gregg B. Walker, Oregon State University

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E. Franklin Dukes, Karen E. Firehock, Juliana E. Birkhoff

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Beginning with the famous opening to the Declaration of Independence ("When in the course of human events..."), almost all of Thomas Jeffersons writings include creative, stylistically and philosophically complex references to time and history. Although best known for his "forward-looking" statements envisioning future progress, Jefferson was in fact deeply concerned with the problem of coming to terms with the impending loss or fragmentation of the past. As Hannah Spahn shows in Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, his efforts to promote an exceptionalist interpretation of the United States as the first nation to escape from the "crimes and calamities" of European history were complicated both by his doubts about the outcome of the American experiment and by his skepticism about the methods and morals of eighteenth-century philosophical history.Spahn approaches the conundrum of Jeffersons Janus-faced, equally forward- and backward-oriented thought by discussing it less as a matter of personal contradiction and paradox than as the expression of a late Newtonian Enlightenment, in a period between ancient and modern modes of explaining change in time. She follows Jefferson in his creation of an influential narrative of American and global history over the course of half a century, opening avenues into a temporal and historical imagination that was different from ours, and offering new assessments of the solutions Jefferson and his generation found (or failed to find) to central moral and political problems like slavery.

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Democracy came to South Africa in April 1994, when the African National Congress won a landslide victory in the first free national election in the countrys history. That definitive and peaceful transition from apartheid is often cited as a model for others to follow. The new order has since survived several transitions of ANC leadership, and it averted a potentially destabilizing constitutional crisis in 2008. Yet enormous challenges remain. Poverty and inequality are among the highest in the world. Staggering unemployment has fueled xenophobia, resulting in deadly aggression directed at refugees and migrant workers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Violent crime rates, particularly murder and rape, remain grotesquely high. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was shockingly mishandled at the highest levels of government, and infection rates continue to be overwhelming. Despite the countrys uplifting success of hosting Africas first World Cup in 2010, inefficiency and corruption remain rife, infrastructure and basic services are often semifunctional, and political opposition and a free media are under pressure. In this volume, major scholars chronicle South Africas achievements and challenges since the transition. The contributions, all previously unpublished, represent the state of the art in the study of South African politics, economics, law, and social policy.

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How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America

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In one of Common Senses most ringing phrases, Thomas Paine declared it "absurd" for "a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Such powerful words, coupled with powerful ideas, helped spur the United States to independence.In The Nation's Nature, James D. Drake examines how a relatively small number of inhabitants of the Americas, huddled along North Americas east coast, came to mentally appropriate the entire continent and to think of their nation as America. Drake demonstrates how British North American colonists participation in scientific debates and imperial contests shaped their notions of global geography. These ideas, in turn, solidified American nationalism, spurred a revolution, and shaped the ratification of the Constitution.Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenthcentury studies

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Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickenss and nineteenth-century Englands greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novels retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novels narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickenss life during the years 1850 to 1853.Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esthers complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickenss seldom-studied A Childs History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx.Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

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Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

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Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In The Enemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandalsincluding those involving John C. Fremonts administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butlers in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton tradeto deeper anxieties.The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nations wars and in every period of the nations history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats.In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens definitions of corruption manifested their specific fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners most cherished beliefs and values.

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The wild boar appears to us as something straight out of a myth. But as Jeffrey Greene learned, these creatures are very real, living by night and, despite shrinking habitats and hordes of hunters, thriving on six continents. Greene purchased an eighteenth-century presbytery in a region of ponds and forests in northern Burgundy between the Loire and Seine Rivers of France. He soon discovered hed moved to one of the most densely populated boar areas in Europe. Following the gift of a side of boar from a neighbor, and a dramatic early-morning encounter with a boar-hunting party and its prey, Greene became fascinated with the animal and immersed himself in the legend and the reality of the wild boar. Although it has no natural enemies, the boar is in constant conflict with humans. Most societies consider it a pest, not only wreaking havoc on crops and livestock, but destroying golf-course greens in search of worms, even creating a hazard for drivers (hogs on the roads cause over 14,000 car accidents a year in France). It has also been the object of highly ritualized hunts, dating back to classical times.The animals remarkable appearance--it can grow larger than a person, and the males sport prominent tusks, called "whetters" and "cutters"--has inspired artists for centuries; its depictions range from primitive masks to works of high art such as Pietro Taccas Porcellino and paintings by Velazquez and Frans Snyders. The boar also plays a unique role in myth, appearing in the stories of Hercules and Adonis as well as in the folktale Beauty and the Beast.The authors search for the elusive animal takes him to Sardinia, Corsica, and Tuscany; he even casts an eye to the American South, where he explores the boars feral-pig counterparts and descendents. He introduces us to a fascinating cast of experts, from museum curators and scientists to hunters and chefs (who share their recipes) to the inhabitants of chateaux who have lived in the same ancient countryside with generations of boars. They are all part of a journey filled with wonders and discoveries about these majestic animals the poet Robinson Jeffers called "beautiful monsters."

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Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment

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By looking at engagee literature from the recent past, when the francophone African writer was implicitly seen as imparted with a mission, to the present, when such authors usually aspire to be acknowledged primarily for their work as writers, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment addresses the currrent processes of canonization in contemporary francophone African literature. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Celerier argue that aesthetic as well as political issues are now at the forefront of debates about the African literary canon, as writers and critics increasingly acknowledge the ideology of form. Working across genres but focusing on the novel, the authors take up the question of renewed forms of commitment in this literature. Their selected writers range from Mongo Beti, Ousmane Sembene, and Aminata Sow Fall to Boubacar Boris Diop, Veronique Tadjo, Alain Mabanckou, and Leonora Miano, among others.

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We are living in the midst of the Earths sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earths systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.An inspiration for Roseand a touchstone throughout her bookis the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species."People save what they love," observed Michael Soule, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of lovingand therefore capable of caring forthe animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

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Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in both autobiography and environmental literature. In Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, Mark Allister brings these two genres together by examining a distinct form of grief narrative, in which the writers deal with mourning by standing explicitly both outside and inside the text: outside in writing about the natural world; inside in making that exposition part of the grieving process.Building on Peter Fritzell's thesis in Nature Writing and America that the best American nature writing blends Aristotelian natural history and Augustinian confession, this work of literary interpretation draws on psychoanalytical narrative theory, studies of grieving, autobiography theory, and ecocriticism for its insights into how nature writing can become an autobiographical, healing act.Allister examines works by Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Ehrlich in order to demonstrate the difficulty of hearing nature speak, and of translating terrain and self into language and form. As he focuses on the many ways in which humans connectoften deeply and urgentlyto animals or the land, Allister vastly extends our understanding of "relational" autobiography.

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Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

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The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genresincluding exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literaturethese seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the authors, their work, and the ways in which science and nature unite them.Visions of the Land explores how our environmental attitudes have influenced and been shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the twentieth century. Bryson offers a literary-critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds, scientific training, and geographic experiences represented nature through various kinds of natural science, from natural history to cartography to resource management to ecology and evolution, and in the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science itself.Visions of the Land examines the varied, sometimes conflicting, but always fascinating ways in which we have defined the relations among science, nature, language, and the human community. Ultimately, it is an extended meditation on the capacity of using science to live well within nature.

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Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction

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In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbors potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In revising Gustave Flauberts Sentimental Education in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton critiques the nineteenth-century European novel as morbidly obsessed with deferred desires. Finally, in works by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations.In The Flirts Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novel. The author examines flirtation in major British, French, and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity and ambivalence on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived. But the impact of flirtation was not only formal. Kaye views coquetry as an arena of freedom built on a dialectic of simultaneous consent and refusal, as well as an expression of "managed desire," a risky display of female power, and a cagey avenue for the expression of dissident sexualities. Through coquetry, novelists offered their response to important scientific and social changes and to the rise of the metropolis as a realm of increasingly transient amorous relations.Challenging current trends in gender, post-gender, and queer-theory criticism, and considering texts as diverse as Darwins The Descent of Man and Gilbert and Sullivans The Mikado, Kaye insists that critical appraisals of Victorian and Edwardian fiction must move beyond existing paradigms defining considerations of flirtation in the novel. The Flirts Tragedy offers a lively, revisionary, often startling assessment of nineteenth-century fiction that will alter our understanding of the history of the novel.

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The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray

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In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic forminscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people.Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memorythe other two being the southern body and southern memoirupon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts.In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.

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The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

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Tom Paines America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolutionand the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic Worldinspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic."One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities.In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in Americas late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

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The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia

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From Jamestown to Jefferson sheds new light on the contexts surrounding Thomas Jeffersons Statute for Religious Freedomand on the emergence of the American understanding of religious freedomby examining its deep roots in colonial Virginias remarkable religious diversity. Challenging traditional assumptions about life in early Virginia, the essays in this volume show that the colony was more religious, more diverse, and more tolerant than commonly supposed. The presence of groups as disparate as Quakers, African and African American slaves, and Presbyterians, alongside the established Anglicans, generated a dynamic tension between religious diversity and attempts at hegemonic authority that was apparent from Virginias earliest days. The contributors, all renowned scholars of Virginia history, treat in detail the complex interactions among Virginias varied religious groups, both in and out of power, as well as the seismic changes unleashed by the Statutes adoption in 1786. From Jamestown to Jefferson suggests that the daily religious practices and struggles that took place in the town halls, backwoods settlements, plantation houses, and slave quarters that dotted the colonial Virginia landscape helped create a social and political space within which a new understanding of religious freedom, represented by Jeffersons Statute, could emerge.Contributors:Edward L. Bond, Alabama A&M University * Richard E. Bond, Virginia Wesleyan College * Thomas E. Buckley, Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University/Graduate Theological Union * Daniel L. Dreisbach, American University, School of Public Affairs * Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University * Monica Najar, Lehigh University * Paul Rasor, Virginia Wesleyan College * Brent Tarter, Library of Virginia

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The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation

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Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly revised historians understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics. Contesting Slavery builds on the best of that literature to reexamine the politics of slavery in revolutionary America and the early republic.The original essays collected here analyze the Revolutionary era and the early republic on their own terms to produce fresh insights into the politics of slavery before 1840. The collection forces historians to rethink the multiple meanings of slavery and antislavery to a broad array of Americans, from free and enslaved African Americans to proslavery ideologues, from northern farmers to northern female reformers, from minor party functionaries to political luminaries such as Henry Clay.The essays also delineate the multiple ways slavery sustained conflict and consensus in local, regional, and national politics. In the end, Contesting Slavery both establishes the abiding presence of slavery and sectionalism in American political life and challenges historians long-standing assumptions about the place, meaning, and significance of slavery in American politics between the Revolutionary and antebellum eras.Contributors: Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria * David F. Ericson, George Mason University * John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, New Kensington * Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University * Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology * James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Robert G. Parkinson, Shepherd University * Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Oxford * Padraig Riley, Dalhousie University * Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University * Brian Schoen, Ohio University * Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden * George William Van Cleve, University of Virginia * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University

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Since 1982, the renowned Civil War historian James I. "Bud" Robertsons Civil War Sites in Virginia: A Tour Guide has enlightened and informed Civil War enthusiasts and scholars alike. The book expertly explores the commonwealths Civil War sites for those hoping to gain greater insight and understanding of the conflict. But in the years since the books original publication, accessibility to many sites and the interpretive material available have improved dramatically. In addition, new historical markers have been erected, and new historically significant sites have been developed, while other sites have been lost to modern development or other encroachments. The historian Brian Steel Wills offers here a revised and updated edition that retains the core of the original guide, with its rich and insightful prose, but that takes these major changes into account, introducing especially the benefits of expanded interpretation and of improved accessibility. The guide incorporates new information on the lives of a broad spectrum of soldiers and citizens while revisiting scenes associated with the eras most famous personalities. New maps and a list of specialized tour suggestions assist in planning visits to sites, while three dozen illustrations, from nineteenth-century drawings to modern photographs, bring the war and its impact on the Old Dominion vividly to life. With the sesquicentennial remembrances of the American Civil War heightening interest and spurring improvements, there may be no better time to learn about and visit these important and moving sites than now.

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The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

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Although the questions of modernity and postmodernity are debated as frequently in the Caribbean as in other cultural zones, the Enlightenmentgenerally considered the origin of European modernityis rarely discussed as such in the Caribbean context. Paul B. Miller constellates modern Caribbean writers of varying national and linguistic traditions whose common thread is their representation of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean. In a comparative reading of such writers as Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), C. L. R. James (Trinidad), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia (Puerto Rico), Miller shows how these authors deploy their historical imagination in order to assess and reevaluate the elusive and often conflicted origins of their own modernity.Miller documents the conceptual and ideological shift from an earlier generation of writers to a more recent one whose narrative strategies bear a strong resemblance to postmodern cultural practices, including the use of parody in targeting their discursive predecessors, the questioning of Enlightenment assumptions, and a suspicion regarding the dialectical unfolding of history as their precursors understood it. By positing the Cuban Revolution as a dividing line between the earlier generation and their postmodern successors, Miller confers a Caribbean specificity upon the commonplace notion of postmodernity.The dual advantage of Elusive Origins's thematic specificity coupled with its inclusiveness allows a reflection on canonical writers in conjunction with lesser-known figures. Furthermore, the inclusion of Francophone and Anglophone writers in addition to those from the Hispanic Caribbean opens up the volume geographically, linguistically, and nationally, expanding its contribution to a nonessentialist understanding of the Caribbean in a Latin American, Atlantic, and global context.

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Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism

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By 1901, the public museum was firmly established as an important national institution in British life. Its very centrality led to its involvement in a wide range of debates about art, knowledge, national identity, and individual agency. Ruth Hoberman argues that these debates concerned writers as well. Museum Trouble focuses on fiction written between 1890 and 1914 and the ways in which it engaged the issues dramatized by and within the museum.

Those issues were many. Art critics argued about what kind of art to buy on behalf of the nation, how to display it, and whether salaried professionals or aristocratic amateurs should be in charge. Museum administrators argued about the best way to exhibit scientific and cultural artifacts to educate the masses while serving the needs of researchers. And novelists had their own concerns about an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace, the nature of aesthetic response, the impact of evolution and scientific materialism, and the relation of the individual to Britains national and imperial identity.

In placing the many crucial museum scenes of Edwardian fiction in the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cultural discourse, Museum Trouble shows how this turn-of-the-century literature anticipated many of the concerns of the modernist writers who followed.