The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750-1918

This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country’s borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing.

Dominique Bauer is Assistant Professor of History at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven, Belgium, and a member of the Centre d’Analyse Culturelle de la Première Modernité at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Camilla Murgia is Assistant Professor in History of Art at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Previously, she was Junior Lecturer and Substitute Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Lausanne, where she researched space, theatre, and staging in nineteenth-century France.