Representing the Nation: A Reader: Histories, Heritage, Museums / Edition 1

by David Boswell, Jessica Evans

Overview

Gathering key writings from leading thinkers in cultural studies, cultural history, and museum studies, Representing the Nation: A reader explores the role cultural institutions play in creating and shaping our sense of ourselves as a nation.

With an international perspective focusing on the USA, France, Australia, the UK and India, leading figures and authors, including Tony Bennet, Ralph Samuel and Carol Duncan examine the way the past is preserved, represented and consumed as our ‘heritage’.

Written in three sections, the book examines:

• strategies involved in creating and sustaining a national culture
• the growth of heritage culture, from the founding of the National Trust in 1895 to the heritage acts of the 1980s
• why it has become important for nations to preserve the past and in whose name is it preserved and displayed
• the historical development of the public museum
• issues and difficulties facing museums today and the competing demands and interests of public funding bodies, tourists and local communities.

For the disciplines of both museum studies and cultural studies this will be vital reading material, and is also perfect as a course reader for a new MA in media and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415208703
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/22/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Boswell is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University. Jessica Evans is Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the Open University.

Table of Contents

	List of illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgements	xiii
	Introduction: Nation and Representation	1
Part 1	Culture, community and nation	9
	Introduction to Part One	11
1	Tradition and Translation: National Culture in its Global Context	15
2	Culture, Community, Nation	33
3	History and Modernity: Reflections on the Theory of Nationalism	45
4	Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914	61
5	Englishness and the National Culture	87
Part 2	Representing the past as heritage and its consumption	109
	Introduction to Part Two	111
6	Trafficking in History	115
7	The Climate of Decline	151
8	Resurrectionism	163
9	Fatal Attractions	185
10	Gazing on History	208
Part 3	Museums as classificatory systems and their prehistories	233
	Introduction to Part Three	235
11	National Monuments	240
12	Fear of Circuses: Founding the National Museum of Victoria	258
13	The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893: "And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?"	273
14	From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London	304
15	The Exhibitionary Complex	332
Part 4	Museums and cultural management	363
	Introduction to Part Four	365
16	Attempts to Define 'Museum'	371
17	Useful Culture	380
18	Cultural Policy: Research and the Government Imperative	394
19	Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India	404
20	Rewriting The Museums' Fictions: Taxonomies, Stories and Readers	421
21	Museums as Contact Zones	435
	Index	459