Enfilade

Distributed by Yale UP:

Adriano Aymonino, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107178, £50 / $65.

The central decades of the eighteenth century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period’s most important campaigns of patronage and collecting was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Sir Hugh Smithson (1712–1786) and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716–1776). This book examines four houses they refurbished in eclectic architectural styles—Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle—alongside the innumerable objects they collected, their funerary monuments, and their persistent engagement in Georgian London’s public sphere. Over the years, their commissions embraced or pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. Patrons of many artists and architects, they are revealed, particularly, as the greatest supporters of Robert Adam. In every instance, minute details contributed to large-scale projects expressing the Northumberlands’ various aesthetic and cultural allegiances. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism and historicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour and the Enlightenment.

Adriano Aymonino is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate programs, Department of History and History of Art, University of Buckingham.

From Amsterdam UP:

Dominique Bauer, Camilla Murgia, eds., Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces, and Museums, 1750–1918 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-9463720908, €109 / $124.

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced, and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the Wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.

Dominique Bauer is Assistant Professor of History at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven, Belgium, and a member of the Centre d’Analyse Culturelle de la Première Modernité at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Camilla Murgia is Junior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Lausanne.

C O N T E N T S

Camilla Murgia, Introduction: Staging the Temporary: The Fragile Character of Space

I. The Department Store
1  Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone, ‘One Need Be Neither a Shopper Nor a Purchaser to Enjoy’: Ephemeral Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1870–1905
2  Kathryn A. Haklin, Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames

II. Spectacles
3  Susan Taylor-Leduc, Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment
4  Camilla Murgia, Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris
5  Juliet Simpson, Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the ‘Northern Gothic Art Tour’ – Ephemera and Alterity

III. At the Intersection of Literature and the Built Environment
6  Dominique Bauer, The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Display in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium: At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature
7  Li-hsin Hsu, The ‘Phantasmatic’ Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘The Chinese Empire’ and Mark Twain’s Roughing It

IV. The Museum and Alternative Exhibition Spaces
8  Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, ‘Show Meets Science’: How Hagenbeck’s ‘Human Zoos’ Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation
9  Emanuele Pellegrini, The Last Wunderkammer: Curiosities in Private Collections between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
10  Nirmalie Alexandra Mulloli, The Impact of Alternative Exhibition Spaces on European Modern Art before World War I

Index

From the U of Virginia Press:

Jacob Sider Jost, Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 204 pages, ISBN 978-0813945040 (cloth), $55 / ISBN 9780813945057 (paperback) $28 / ISBN 978-0813945064 (ebook), $28.

Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them ‘interesting’. Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life.

Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To ‘be in the interest of’ or ‘have an interest with’ another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Jacob Sider Jost is Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College and author of Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 (Virginia).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  The Whig Theory of Mind: Influence and Interpretation in Lord Hervey
2  The Variety of Human Wishes
3  Professor Smith
4  Interesting Narratives
Conclusion: Reigning Words and Glorious Revolutions

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index