Victorian Prism Refractions of the Crystal Palace

Last year a series of conferences in New York, Santa Cruz, and London commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace, the architectural breakthrough at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that symbolized the quintessence of British industrial and technological progress. Gathered here are the best of the papers from those conferences by a number of leading scholars in their fields. Each essay makes an important new contribution to thinking about the place occupied both materially and discursively by the Crystal Palace and other 19th- and 20th-century exhibitions in the struggle to come to meaningful terms with the modern world. With essays from cultural and social historians, literary critics, and art historians, the collection as a whole focuses on how these exhibitions, in attempting to define the cultures of their day, incorporated a range of conflicting ideologies and agendas, in fact compromising their ability to convey a unified message about modernity. The volume also addresses the ways in which the cultural processes and tendencies brought together in these exhibitions have been refracted down to the present, thus informing and complicating our own relationship to modernity and postmodernity.After an initial query by Eileen Gillooly last January, Joseph Childers followed up in August by sending the proposal. Recognizing both the quality of its preparation and the prominence of the editors and contributors ("the lineup of scholars is scarcely to be faulted"), series editor Jerry McGann urged outside review of the proposal for what he takes to be an attractive collection and a promising addition to the Victorian series. I agree. The volume would build not only on our previouspublication of Barbara Black's book, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000) but also on John Burris's Exhibiting Religion (2001).Buzard, James is the author of 'Victorian Prism Refractions of the Crystal Palace', published 2007 under ISBN 9780813926032 and ISBN 0813926033.