Loose Can(n)on: Literary tradition in Daljit Nagra’s British Museum

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

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The fate of the bird specimens from Cook's voyages possessed by Sir Joseph Banks

Archives of Natural History ◽

10.3366/e0260954109000965 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 36 (2) ◽

pp. 231-243 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

David G. Medway

Keyword(s):

Royal College ◽

British Museum ◽

John Hunter ◽

The World ◽

Extensive Collection

Joseph Banks possessed the greater part of the zoological specimens collected on James Cook's three voyages round the world (1768–1780). In early 1792, Banks divided his zoological collection between John Hunter and the British Museum. It is probable that those donations together comprised most of the zoological specimens then in the possession of Banks, including such bird specimens as remained of those that had been collected by himself and Daniel Solander on Cook's first voyage, and those that had been presented to him from Cook's second and third voyages. The bird specimens included in the Banks donations of 1792 became part of a series of transactions during the succeeding 53 years which involved the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and William Bullock. It is a great pity that, of the extensive collection of bird specimens from Cook's voyages once possessed by Banks, only two are known with any certainty to survive.

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The Pornographer and McGahern's Allusive Practice

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2017.0281 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 281-297

Author(s):

Tom Walker

Keyword(s):

Social Practice ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

The Novel ◽

Present Value ◽

The Past

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.

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