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St Hugh’s Fellow publishes monograph showing how museum practices shed new light on literary form.

Emma Bond, Tutorial Fellow in Italian at St Hugh’s, and Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, has published a monograph 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 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, Emma 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.

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147959/curating-worlds/