Author's Effects

<em>The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum </em>is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain Europe and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer's house museum <em>The Author's Effects</em> anatomises the how and why of the emergence establishment and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. <p/>It traces how and why the writer's bodily remains possessions and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer's house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics--Burns' skull Keats' hair Petrarch's cat Poe's raven Bronte's bonnet Dickinson's dress Shakespeare's chair Austen's desk Woolf's spectacles Hawthorne's window Freud's mirror Johnson's coffee-pot and Bulgakov's stove amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologised themselves and their work--Thoreau's cabin and Dumas' tower Scott's Abbotsford and Irving's Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch's Arqua Rousseau's Ile St Pierre and Shakespeare's Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare's New Place for 2016.<br>