"In Curiosities and Texts, Marjorie Swann examines the imperatives behind the craze for collecting physical objects and discusses its relationship to the literary culture of the period. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies, she addresses two important questions: How was the collection, which was understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early modern England to construct new social selves and modes of subjectivity?

And how did literary texts - both as material objects and as vehicles of representation - participate in the process of negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting? For Swann, such superficially disparate artifacts as a gentleman's prized "african charm made out of teeth," the narrative catalogs of English landscape features that begin to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and the famous 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson, in which a living author for the first time issued his own collected "Works," can be profitably viewed as parts of a single cultural dynamic.

Constructing her argument with a balance of detail and insight, Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to literature, social authority, and personal identity."--BOOK JACKET.