Download or read book Curiosities and Texts written by Marjorie Swann and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.