Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature - Softcover

Bond, Emma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810147955 ISBN 13: 9780810147959

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Showing how museum practices shed new light on literary form

How and why do books deploy objects in order to narrate the past? To answer this question, Emma Bond sifts through collections of objects stored in boxes, drawers, baskets, and displayed on shelves in contemporary texts by authors such as Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste, Orhan Pamuk, and Olga Tokarczuk and interprets them using a framework of museum practices. These practices, which include collection, curation, conservation, and display, have helped to turn real-life museums into three-dimensional narrative spaces. Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature shows how we can use this same set of practices to shed light on literary form itself: how stories are created, shaped, and communicated. Harnessing museum practices as an innovative lens for critical interpretation, Bond provides a fresh theoretical framework to engage with the meanings of object collections in literature and to make sense of the lives, and afterlives, of things today.

About this title

About the Author

Emma Bond is a professor of Italian and comparative studies at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her books include Writing Migration through the Body, and she has served as an advisor or guest curator for a number of museums, including V&A Dundee, the Watt Institution, and the Wardlaw Museum.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810147955
• ISBN 13: 9780810147959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216