TY - BOOK AU - Swann,Marjorie TI - Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England T2 - Material Texts SN - 9780812236101 U1 - 942.06 PY - 2010///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - Antiquarians KW - Great Britain KW - Biography KW - Collectors and collecting KW - England KW - History KW - 17th century KW - Curiosities and wonders KW - English literature KW - Early modern, 1500-1700 KW - History and criticism KW - Early modern KW - Natural history KW - Literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh KW - bisacsh KW - Cultural Studies KW - European History KW - World History N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction --; Chapter 1. Cultures of Collecting in Early Modern England --; Chapter 2. Sons of Science --; Chapter 3. The Countryside as Collection --; Chapter 4. The Author as Collector --; Epilogue: An Ornament to the Nation --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical objects: antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, mummified corpses, zoological specimens, plants, ethnographic objects from Asia and the Americas, statues, portraits. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular?In Curiosities and Texts, Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum.Through this wide-ranging series of case studies, Swann addresses two important questions: How was the collection, which was understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early modern England to construct new social selves and modes of subjectivity? And how did literary texts-both as material objects and as vehicles of representation-participate in the process of negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting? Crafting her unique argument with a balance of detail and insight, Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to literature, social authority, and personal identity UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203172 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812203172 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812203172/original ER -