"Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum offers an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relation between British Romantic poetry and the rise of national museum culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In a simultaneously theoretical and historical analysis, it studies a range of poetry and aesthetic philosophy in relation to the first hundred years of the British Museum, from its establishment in the 1750s to the completion of its current edifice in the 1850s. It thereby provides a sequence of aesthetic reflections on the various social, cultural, and imaginative challenges posed by this novel institution.

In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poem Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics.".

"Poetic Exhibitions seek both to enrich the study of modern museums with the insights of literary theory and to establish a more practical connection between Romanticism and its attendant ideologies. By reading the aesthetic reflections of such writers as Joseph Addison, William Hogarth, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in relation to the exhibitionary plans and popular guidebooks for the early museum, Gidal demonstrates the connections between abstract theory and cultural politics.

By reflecting upon the collections and excavations of Sir Hans Sloane, Lord Elgin, Charles Townley, and Austen Henry Layard in relation to their institutional acquisition, he explores the poetics of national incorporation. By comparing the works of such poets as Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti alongside promotions and receptions of the national museum, he illustrates the connections between lyric expression and material exhibition.

Throughout the book, he argues that the operative dialogue between aesthetics and ideology enables rather than obstructs critical reflection."--BOOK JACKET.