The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

Jazz photographs are evidentiary documents, nostalgic memorials, and contributors to a romantic mythology and mystique. Sight and sound are combined and made more potent by mutual association. But classic jazz photographs do not exist in the realm of myth alone. Jazz photographs intersected with trends in portraiture, documentary, and advertising during the peak decades of the music’s popularity. They described the social contours of the music– the places where it was heard and the communities formed around it. And images helped sell the music, whether promoting performances or recordings. Photographs also made African American artistic innovation more obvious as the drive for equality gained momentum. The symbiotic relationship between the two art forms has been strengthened over more than one hundred years. Publicity portraiture, photojournalism, album cover imagery, street photography, African American photography, and archival and exhibition curation have all probed the music’s deep beauty for visual analogues and associations.

The first chapter examines contemporary exhibitions inside and outside Iran as historiographical sites of knowledge production about modernist Iranian art. This chapter focuses on two case studies, the exhibition Iran Modern (2013–2014) and the canceled exhibition project Tehran Modern, which was supposed to present artworks from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection at the National Gallery in Berlin. In light of these exhibitions outside of Iran, this chapter also investigates the history, legacy, and exhibition activities of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as the official institution for modern art in Iran. A comparative perspective shows how these exhibitions repeated and strengthened the historiographical paradigm that modernist Iranian art production symbolizes the country’s successful modernization and secularization during the Pahlavi rule. A close analysis demonstrates that the depoliticized reading of Iranian modernist art in the respective exhibition contexts serves different contemporary political interests.

This essay discusses the role of East Anglia in the biography and literary works of Sebald. Sebald lived from 1970 until his premature death in 2001 in the eastern part of England, whose charm as a remote stretch of land has left its mark in his writings in many ways. As early as 1974, Sebald published a travelogue in the travel section of the newspaper Die Zeit, describing ‘A Leisurely Tour through Norfolk and Suffolk’. This journalistic piece anticipated the portrayal of East Anglia in his later narrative texts. Similarly, East Anglia repeatedly became a theme in Sebald’s poetry with motifs returning in the later prose. The essay focuses on After Nature and The Rings of Saturn, but also includes Austerlitz and the Corsica Project. To conclude, it examines the extent to which Sebald’s account can be understood as a faithful description of East Anglia, or rather, as the essay argues, as a poetic portrait of the area that constituted Sebald’s second “Heimat”.

In January 1917, the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries in London, was advertised with two different posters. One displayed an oversize red cross on a white background – the Red Cross emblem and the English national flag. The other depicted Shakespeare’s coat of arms. The exhibition, described in the press as the most comprehensive show of Shakespeareana ever exhibited, was originally curated in Manchester as part of the celebrations of the 1916 Tercentenary, the commemoration of the three hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In London, it became part of the war effort, the way civilians at the ‘Home Front’ did their bit to help the British Army in the trenches. The exhibition, a successful charity venture, moved to London thanks to the collaboration of actor-manager Martin Harvey and the British Red Cross, one of several wartime collaborations between the British NPO and the theatrical profession to bring relief to Western Front soldiers. The poster portraying Shakespeare’s coat of arms aimed to present Shakespeare as an English gentleman, to counteract the influence of the Baconians who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. This exhibition was one of several ways in which Shakespeare’s cultural capital was enlisted to raise funds in wartime.

Booksellers were not necessarily concerned with describing physical properties, and sometimes gave no condition details at all; but in their catalogues can be traced something of the changing fortunes of some well-known early printed books, reflecting in turn the changing tastes and preoccupations of successive collectors. This serves as background to a very gradual change in understanding of old bindings, particularly by W.H.J.Weale.

In representing print in the context of the history of human knowledge more generally, the national libraries were at an advantage. However, while they could offer permanent exhibitions, whether of books or antiquities, they could not easily present them in the contexts of modern achievements. For this, the multitude of temporary exhibitions, presenting old and new objects side by side, offered another perspective. They also reached audiences unfamiliar with the fixed presentations whether in London or Paris.

Taking as its point of departure the preeminent association between momentary experience and urban existence, this chapter expands on how the modern city’s relationship to temporariness is conceived by approaching it through particular forms of temporary urban space. It focuses in turn on several sites that emerged (and subsequently vanished) in the early twentieth century, each of which embodies a metropolis in microcosm: the White City exhibitions, the trench system on the Western Front, and the elaborate sets that were constructed for an expanding British film industry. In drawing a connection between literature’s interest in temporariness in this period and the pseudo-cities that parallel it – exhibitionary, military, and cinematographic – the chapter charts how responses to urban ephemera in the work of such writers as Isaac Rosenberg, Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, and Katherine Mansfield are inflected through these spaces, as well as how such responses evolve across the century’s opening decades.

While Gothic scholars of the last two or three decades have explored forms of Gothic sensation, spectacle or visuality, they have generally had as their focus illustrations, caricature prints, graphic ephemera and advertising material rather than oil paintings and watercolours by the famous artists associated with Romanticism. This chapter considers precisely those works of art that have defined Romanticism. The more circumscribed notion of art and the artist associated with the ‘autonomisation’ of art around 1800 is here tied to the emergence of Gothic forms and themes within painting. It is argued that it is more than coincidental that the chronology of the original phase of Gothic literary and cultural production matches that of the development of aesthetics as philosophical discourse, and the ‘invention of art’ as a relatively autonomous field of activity. That a full-blooded Gothic art subsequently resurfaces only intermittently in the history of ‘high art’ exposes not only the volatility and inconstancy of Gothic culture, or the irreconcilability of the Gothic and art, but also the general ambivalence towards the indeterminacies of art in the modern era.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71 exercised a dramatic impact on the rhetoric around private collecting, this chapter suggests. It examines why conservative collectors such as baron Jérôme Pichon felt that they were personally under attack as the city was shelled and burned during the année terrible, and suggests that heritage became intensely politicised, as radicals were blamed for repeating the vandalism previously seen in the Revolution of 1789. The chapter emphasis the emergence of a belligerent branch of art history written by Pichon’s associations- like Louis Courajod and baron Charles Davillier- and stresses that conservative collectors took their vision of the past into the public sphere through the vibrant culture of temporary exhibitions which emerged under the Second Empire. Through the figure of baron Léopold Double, it explores the cult of the old regime created by royalists but also argues that this cult proved very unstable in the new political and economic circumstances of the 1880s.

This chapter seeks to extend previous studies of Charles Babbage’s celebrated difference engine through an examination of a rare surviving fragment in the Whipple Museum’s collection. Constructed from scrap parts inherited by Charles’s son, Henry, in order to relaunch the engine project, the fragment has much to reveal about the afterlife of Babbage’s most famous failure. An appendix to the chapter also publishes for the first time key documents relating to Henry Babbage’s project.