Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940

""...“discovering” the new geographical regions of international exhibitions, examination of their similarities and specific raison d'être, is the strength of this volume. It certainly points toward a great number of potential avenues for additional problematizing of presented material. All contributions provide an up-to-date bibliography, which extends the volume’s capacity to be an exceptional departure for more advanced studies. There are many surprising ingredients and promising observations to be found throughout the essays, leading one to suspect that the international exhibitions set in the geographical and political margins could in fact become a significant scholarly trend, causing a reassessment of the established scholarship on the subject."" - Andrey Shabanov, European University at St. Petersburg in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, 2017 'For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, international exhibitions served as a major testing ground for new ideas in manufacturing, art, and design. This fine work, with essays by noted scholars from an impressive array of countries and backgrounds, explores a largely overlooked aspect of this phenomenon: those exhibitions held not in the great European or American urban centers, but on the periphery, in cities and countries outside what is conventionally regarded as the mainstream. Insightful, wide-ranging, and innovative in its approaches, it is a seminal study of the concepts of marginality and locality and their import.' - Christopher Long, University of Texas, Austin, USA 'This is a rich collection of essays full of new and original research on international exhibitions by a suitably international group of authors. Making connections between these exhibitions ""in the margins"" and the wider national and international landscapes of world fairs and great exhibitions, the essays in this book have the potential to expand greatly our understanding of the dynamic ""exhibition network"" that operated across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Even scholars who are very familiar with the literature on great exhibitions will be surprised by the number and diversity of events discussed in the chapters of this book.' - Sarah Victoria Turner, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, UK 'While the literature on the history of major international exhibitions between the 1850s and 1930s in the West is trendy and flourishing, there are scarce accounts on what preceded them and even less so on how they influenced similar developments in national and global contexts. The recently published collection of essays ... edited by Marta Filipová, is an important step in filling these gaps. ... That is to say, “discovering” the new geographical regions of international exhibitions, examination of their similarities and specific raison d'être, is the strength of this volume.' - H-Net Reviews '[The book is] a valuable contribution to exhibition studies because it illuminates diverse subjects and viewpoints that have previously been overlooked and unaddressed. ... Cultures of International Exhibitions raises important questions over what international exhibitions were and what differentiated them from other paradigms.' - Journal of Curatorial Studies 'A welcome expansion not only of the particular field of world’s fair studies but of larger design and cultural history, Cultures of International Exhibitions, 1840–1940, is highly recommended. It will, no doubt, serve as a go-to reference for many future scholars looking to enrich our understanding of the globalized nineteenth and twentieth-century world even further.' - Journal of Design History