Writing the Ruins of Empire: Romantic Cultural Property

Catalog description

British literary responses to the shifting significance and value status of ancient artifacts and works of art in the period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Ruins as "cultural property," "cultural capital," and "aesthetic object"--then and now. Effects of colonial expansion and imperialist rivalry on collecting, connoisseurship, the advent of public museums, the marketing of antiquities, the marketing of literature. Primary readings in Gibbon, Volney, Byron, P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Hazlitt, Keats.