"This lucidly written and handsomely produced volume offers valuable insights in how museums at certain moments crystallize wider debates about the relationship among politics, culture, and gender. . . . Bailkin has opened up many lines of inquiry in the historical context of museological practice and debate and the wider poilitics of culture of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain."—Holger Hoock, American Historical Review
"An original, truly interdisciplinary book that draws on British history, art history, museum studies, law, and women's studies in an investigation of the 'material culture of Liberalism' in Britain from 1870 to 1914. . . . The book contains much fascinating material and reflects extensive research in museum archives, legal recoreds, newspapers, journals, and parliamentary debates."—Choice
"Bailkin's book will speak to anyone interested in the fraught cultural consolidation of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, or in the vagaries between the nation and the state."
"While we have become accustomed to simple assertions of the essentially political nature of all aesthetic controversies, Jordanna Bailkin offers an incontestable and extremely interesting version of the relationship."
"Bailkin asks some fascinating and provocative questions, and complicates our understanding of culture and its relationship to politics. Indeed, she successfully adds the cultural realm to the story of the 'crisis' of liberalism."
"A sophisticated, innovative study and a welcome addition to the literature."
“Employing four detailed case studies, Jordanna Bailkin situates diverse conflicts over cultural property in a fascinating political and social terrain. This book is an important and historically rich contribution to the study of museums and the public life of cultural objects.”<\#209>Bruce J. Altshuler, author of <I>The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century
“This splendid book manages to be both learned and witty, gracefully argued and densely researched. With panache, Bailkin puts good old-fashioned politics<\#209>struggles about and for Liberalism and dilemmas confronting the Liberal Party<\#209>back into cultural politics. Each chapter poses an important and nuanced question about the relationships among culture, property, and Liberalism and offers ingenious and persuasive answers.”<\#209>Seth Koven, author of <I>Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London
“<I>The Culture of Property<I> skillfully links case studies of political struggles over the proper place of cultural property into an original work of historical inquiry. Bailkin elegantly reveals how these controversies around heritage issues served to provide a rhetorical arena and symbolic vocabulary to express anxieties with respect to disjunctions between political and cultural nationalisms and between nation, state, and gender during a pivotal period of British imperial politics.”<\#209>Rosemary J. Coombe, author of <I>The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law
"Taken togerther these four studies offer a multilayered perspective on the role of cultural artifacts within the Liberal imagination of a British nation. . . . [Bailkin] succeeds in adding a new dimension to the common postcolonial analysis of cultural property."
"Bailkin offers a model of analysis of the political and institutional inflections that shape visual culture. . . . She refreshingly presents politics through the lens of culture, rather than the more usual other way around, insisting that culture is as powerful a molder and marker of change and conbfilct as politics or economics."
"Taken together these four studies offer a multilayered perspective on the role of cultural artifacts within the Liberal imagination of a British nation prior to World War I. . . . [Bailkin] succeeds in adding a new dimension to the common postcolonial analysis of cultural property."Susan Scafidi, Law and History Review
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude
1. Celtic Gold: The Irish Invention of Repatriation
2. The Art of the Stateless Nation: The National Galleries of Scotland Bill
3. Picturing Feminism, Selling Liberalism: The Case of Disappearing Holbein
4. Civics and "Civi-otics" at the London Museum
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
