Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.

Brad Evans is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920, and the coeditor of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema.