Literature is often defined as a distinct category of writing in terms of particular formal of aesthetic attributes. Tony Bennett suggests that literature be re-defined as an institutionally defined field of textual uses and effects. Charting a course between literary aesthetics and their associated politics, Bennett engages critically with the central concerns of Marxist theoreticians such as Georg Lukacs, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Frank Lentricchia.

This text challenges our understanding of the modern museum. Suggesting that we view the public museum not just as a place of instruction but as a reformatory of manners which provides for a wide range of regulated social routines and performances, Tony Bennett places the museum at the centre of modern relations of culture and government. Juxtaposing the museum's development alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition and interpreting these as interacting technologies of progress, Bennett throws new light on the relations between modern forms of official and popular culture....

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors.

Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture.

Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not...