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Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester,Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.

Stewards of the Nation's Artexamines the internal tensions between Britain's four main public art galleries' administrative directors, the aristocrats dominating the boards of trustees, and those in the Treasury who controlled the funds as well as board appointments.

The architecture of Jerusalem has for centuries been defined by its being a space sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The end of World War I marked the beginning of British Mandatory rule, which lasted until 1948. During this period, Jerusalem witnessed a proliferation of architectural projects that repositioned religion within modern typologies representing the city’s communities. This research investigates four such buildings: the British Rockefeller Museum, the Palestinian Palace Hotel, the American YMCA Building, which functioned as a community center and hostel, and the new Zionist Executive Building. The integration of religious elements into these edifices is examined using the concept of inter-religious engagement and by applying the theory of purification and hybridization. The research demonstrates that British and American Christians, Zionist Jews, and Muslim Palestinians, used different strategies to produce inter-religious engagement—either intentionally or because of British-dictated political constructs. British and American Christians embedded religious elements within modern typologies to reflect peaceful co-existence, while Zionist Jews and Muslim Palestinians used them to construct national identity. Although conceived as “purely” secular, these modern typologies were hybridized by the integration of religious spaces or emblems, revealing further dimensions to our understanding and assessment of 20th-century urban secular architecture and its intersection with religions.

Walter Gropius associated standardisation with promoting civilisation in 1935, yet Andrew Carnegie's influence on the proliferation of pattern book public library plans internationally predated these observations by 50 years. Through the first twenty years of his programme, he supported the erection of almost three thousand public buildings across Britain and America. Though better acknowledged in the US than the UK, this philanthropic contribution radically extended the scope of public provision and remains incomparable in its scale and scope in both nations. Frequently engraved with the self-deifying slogan Let there be Light�, open access to navigate these new interior public spaces after work coincided with the first provision of electric light. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, professional groups had sought to specify minimum standards of natural light and air for schools and hospitals. However, the commercial quantification of electricity accelerated the development of a readily comparable vocabulary to prescribe adequate quantities of light for all tasks regardless of their location or orientation. Seeking to gauge the extent of universal values, this book concentrates on the design and performance of a handful of early Carnegie library buildings in Britain and America, identifying their response to contemporary design theory, but also by contrast to their respective local environmental contexts. It examines whether their standards of provision were equitable and if these privately financed public buildings were the first roots of generically standardised public environments to be shared transatlantically. The book also argues that the public library building type can provide a datum for acknowledging the twentieth century legacy of shared international environmental standards for public spaces more broadly.

The Festival of Jewish Arts in Glasgow was the first and largest Jewish festival in Britain, conceived as a response to, and timed to coincide with, the Festival of Britain in 1951. Held at Glasgow's McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street from February 4-25, 1951, the event showcased works from over fifty internationally renowned Jewish artists, antiquities dating back from the thirteenth century, musical performances, films, lectures, a book display, and a run of sell-out performances of S. An-sky's The Dybbuk. In this essay, I offer the first sustained account of the festival by bringing together available documentation and analyzing the “performance of display” and perspectives on Jewish culture the festival offered. As this essay argues, viewing the material and tangible elements of the festival alongside the social and cultural ideals of its organizers reveals a complex negotiation between the historical place and space of the festival, the concerns of the community, and the tensions between minority and mainstream Scottish and British culture. The Festival of Jewish Arts thus provides a rare window through which to view a Jewish community grappling with issues of loss and reconstructing identity in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, while at the same time trying to transcend the perception of their Otherness and respond to British anxieties about Jewish refugees and the founding of the State of Israel.

In 1957, Richard Altick's groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Putting readers at the centre of literary culture, Altick anticipated-and helped produce-fifty years of scholarly inquiry into the ways and means by which the Victorians read. Now, A Return to the Common Reader asks what Altick's concept of the 'common reader' actually means in the wake of a half-century of research. Digging deep into unusual and eclectic archives and hitherto-overlooked sources, its authors give new understanding to the masses of newly literate readers who picked up books in the Victorian period. They find readers in prisons, in the barracks, and around the world, and they remind us of the power of those forgotten readers to find forbidden texts, shape new markets, and drive the production of new reading material across a century. Inspired and informed by Altick's seminal work, A Return to the Common Reader is a cutting-edge collection which dramatically reconfigures our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever. Contents: Foreword; Preface; Introduction, Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland; Part 1 Publishers, Authors, Critics, Readers: The advantage of fiction: the novel and the 'success' of the Victorian periodical, Laurel Brake; Dorothy's literature class: late-Victorian women autodidacts and penny fiction weeklies, Kate MacDonald; Ouida; how conceptions of the popular reader contributed to the making of a popular novelist, Jane Jordan; 'Those who idle over novels': Victorian critics and post-romantic readers, Debra Gettelman; 'Gossip' and 'twaddle': 19th-century common readers make sense of Jane Austen, Katie Halsey. Part 2 Scenes of Reading: Reading in gaol, Jenny Hartley; Attempts to (re)shape common reading habits: Bible reading on the 19th-century convict ship, Rosalind Crone; 'Quite incapable of appreciating books written for educated readers': the mid-19th-century British soldier, Sharon Murphy; 'A journey round the bookshelves': reading in the Royal Colonial Institute, Beth Palmer; Fiction and the Australian reading public, 1888-1914, Tim Dolin; Selected works cited; Index. Beth Palmer is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. Adelene Buckland is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK.

By 1901, the public museum was firmly established as an important national institution in British life. Its very centrality led to its involvement in a wide range of debates about art, knowledge, national identity, and individual agency. Ruth Hoberman argues that these debates concerned writers as well.Museum Troublefocuses on fiction written between 1890 and 1914 and the ways in which it engaged the issues dramatized by and within the museum. Those issues were many. Art critics argued about what kind of art to buy on behalf of the nation, how to display it, and whether salaried professionals or aristocratic amateurs should be in charge. Museum administrators argued about the best way to exhibit scientific and cultural artifacts to educate the masses while serving the needs of researchers. And novelists had their own concerns about an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace, the nature of aesthetic response, the impact of evolution and scientific materialism, and the relation of the individual to Britain's national and imperial identity. In placing the many crucial museum scenes of Edwardian fiction in the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cultural discourse,Museum Troubleshows how this turn-of-the-century literature anticipated many of the concerns of the modernist writers who followed.

An Infinity of Things tells the story of one of the largest private collections ever created, and the life of the man behind it. Welcome planned a great museum filled with treasures from all corners of the globe, charting the history of human health from prehistory to the present day. The breadth of his vision was matched only by the depth of his pockets. During the opening decades of the twentieth century he acquired a collection so large that later generations of staff took to describing its contents by the ton. But Welcome's museum was never finished, and his collection was still stored in vast warehouses when he died, unseen and incomplete. Today, after decades of work by his successors, artefacts from the collection can be seen in museums and libraries throughout the world. Demonstrating what can happen when a collector's aspirations are left unconstrained by wealth, Frances Larson explores Welcome's life through his possessions, revealing the many tensions in his character: between his talents as a businessman and his desire for scholarly recognition; his curiosity and his perfectionism; and his philanthropic aspirations and his drive for personal glory.

Wollaeger discusses the problematic relation between James Joyce's textaul practice and the interpretive protocals of the postmodern critic in selected moments from \"Wandering Rocks\" in \"Ulysses.\" The reading of Joyce is then compared with the installation works of Hans Haacke.