From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Shawn Malley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317132521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Shawn Malley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317132521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Shawn Malley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317132513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009306472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
This is the first book to establish how classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed Victorian ideas of the past, and consequently informed the very construction of modernity. Its multi-disciplinary approach will be valuable to scholars and graduate students in numerous disciplines across the arts and humanities.

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930 PDF Author: Angela Blumberg
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152616146X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
British literature and archaeology, 1880-1930 reveals how British writers and artists across the long turn of the twentieth century engaged with archaeological discourse—its artefacts, landscapes, bodies, and methods—uncovering the materials of the past to envision radical possibilities for the present and future. This project traces how archaeology shaped major late-Victorian and modern discussions: informing debates over shifting gender roles; facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists historicise the traumas of the First World War. Ultimately unearthing archaeology at the centre of these major discourses, this book simultaneously positions literary and artistic engagements with the archaeological imagination as forms of archaeological knowledge in themselves.

Popular Postcolonialisms

Popular Postcolonialisms PDF Author: Nadia Atia
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317299019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of the world may best be challenged. It also addresses middlebrow cultural production, which has tended to be seen as antithetical to radical traditions, asking whether this might, in fact, form an unlikely realm from which to question, critique, or challenge colonial tropes. Examining the ways in which the imprint of colonial history is in evidence (interrogated, mythologized or sublimated) within popular cultural production, this book raises a series of speculative questions exploring the interrelation of the popular and the postcolonial.

Babylon

Babylon PDF Author: Michael Seymour
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857736078
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Babylon: for eons its very name has been a byword for luxury and wickedness. 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept', wrote the psalmist, 'as we remembered Zion'. One of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Babylon has been eclipsed by its own sinful reputation. For two thousand years the real, physical metropolis lay buried while another, ghostly city lived on, engorged on accounts of its own destruction. More recently the site of Babylon has been the centre of major excavation: yet the spectacular results of this work have done little displace the many other fascinating ways in which the city has endured and reinvented itself in culture. Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian myth to associate himself and his regime with its glorious past. Why has Babylon so creatively fired the human imagination, with results both good and ill? Why has it been so enthralling to so many, and for so long? In exploring answers, Michael Seymour' s book ranges extensively over space and time and embraces art, archaeology, history and literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, via Strabo and Diodorus, to the Book of Revelation, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Voltaire, William Blake and modern interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Gore Vidal, the author brings to light a carnival of disparate sources dominated by the powerful and intoxicating idea of depravity. Yet captivating as this dark mythology was and has continued to be, at its root lies a remarkable and sophisticated imperial civilization whose complex state-building, law- making and religion dominated Mesopotamia and beyond for millennia, before its incorporation into the still wider empire of the Achaemenid kings.

Women and museums 1850–1914

Women and museums 1850–1914 PDF Author: Kate Hill
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526113414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book recovers the significant contribution made by women to museums, not just in obvious roles such as workers, but also as donors, visitors, volunteers and patrons. It suggests that women persistently acted to domesticate the museum, by importing domestic objects and domestic regimes of value, as well as by making museums more welcoming to children, and even by stressing the importance of housekeeping at the museum. At the same time, women sought 'masculine' careers in science and curatorship, but found such aspirations hard to achieve; their contribution tended to be kept within clear, feminised areas. The book will be of interest to those working on gender, culture, or museums in the period. It sheds new light on women's material culture and material strategies, education and professional careers, and leisure practices. It will form an important historical context for those working in contemporary museum studies.

In Context: the Reade Festschrift

In Context: the Reade Festschrift PDF Author: Irving Finkel
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789696089
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
'In Context: the Reade Festschrift' is a collection of invited and peer-reviewed essays by friends and colleagues of Julian Edgeworth Reade, sometime Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum from 1975 to 2000. Here is fresh work from which any reader can gain a new appreciation of the importance of the ancient Near East.

Spirituality, Feminism, and Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture

Spirituality, Feminism, and Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture PDF Author: Alice Eden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135100428X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book proposes new understandings of modern life in Britain by bringing constructs of female spirituality centre stage and examining three ‘forgotten’ artists identified with the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorianism. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson are resituated squarely within the tumultuous social and cultural changes of the period. Becoming visible again, in more inclusive histories, allows such artists not only to re-inhabit but to reshape narratives of modernism, reanimating the scholarly discourse and creating a dynamic cultural history of modern Britain expressed through their striking visions of womanhood. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, gender studies and British studies.

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World

Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World PDF Author: Karen Sonik
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1949057127
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This volume assembles leading Near Eastern art historians, archaeologists, and philologists to examine and apply critical contemporary approaches to the arts and artifacts of the ancient Near East. The contributions in the volume, which include a comprehensive first chapter by the editor and twelve paired chapters (each of which explores a key theme of the volume through a specific case study), are divided into six sections: Representation, Context, Complexity, Materiality, Space, and Time | Afterlives. A number of sub-themes and questions also thread through the volume as a whole: how might art historical, archaeological, anthropological, and philological approaches to the Near East complement and inform each other? How do word and image relate? And how might the field of Near Eastern studies not only adapt and apply approaches developed in other fields but also contribute to critical contemporary discourses? The volume is unified both by the themes that thread through it and by the comprehensive first chapter in the volume, which explores the status of Near Eastern arts and artifacts as simultaneously non-Western and ancient and as neither of these, and which provides a larger theoretical framework for issues addressed in the volume as a whole.