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Book SynopsisThe rise of the museum as a cultural institution in 19th-century America brought with it many contested notions. This work explores the shared concerns and practices of 19th-century American museums and the literary productions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman.
Trade ReviewAn ambitious, highly original, well-written, and beautifully researched piece of scholarship.... Harrison's project is the first to analyze fully P. T. Barnum's American Museum - arguably the best-known cultural institution in antebellum America - in relation to the literary culture of the period. His concern with the politics of interpretation and authority in public spaces links a surprising range of writers to the commercial extravaganzas pioneered by Barnum, and it leads Harrison to a remarkable excavation of antebellum America's now-forgotten public spaces. In its careful attention to the politics of cultural authority, The Temple and the Forum proves a worthy successor to Lawrence Levine's classic Highbrow/Lowbrow. - Benjamin Reiss, author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America
