Cabinets of curiosities: collecting, displaying, consuming

The cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer), a pan-European practice of collecting, displaying, and consuming from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, has in the past attracted museum scholars and cultural historians rather than literary critics. This special issue of EJES argues for its relevance to literary criticism and theory. It treats the cabinet less as a historical phase superseded by the modern museum than as a recurring logic: a structure of attention by which objects, texts, spaces, bodies and records are selected, arranged and, made available to knowledge, pleasure, authority or memory. The contributors read curatorially, asking what a text gathers, how it orders its materials, and what engagement it invites. Throughout, curiosity is entangled with possession, access and control: the cabinet bears traces of Europe’s colonial past, and if it solicits wonder, it also organises authority. In proposing a synchronic view of cabinet and museum as coexisting orders of knowledge, this special issue illustrates some of those historical antecedents while drawing on museum studies scholarship to propose that the cabinet of curiosities might have new relevance for how we understand our world today.