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Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors' lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and archive professionals, the book explores the objects, practices, and institutions that have been at the heart of the modern archival landscape since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Covering a wide range of questions, the volume reconstructs how literary manuscripts turned into secular relics and analyzes the impact that the rise of the archive has had on the scholarly study and public perception of literature as cultural heritage. Individual chapters range from historical accounts of the Romantic origins of manuscript worship to critical discussions of the archiving of contemporary writers' born-digital material.
List of contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Literature, Heritage, Archive
Tim Sommer
Part I: Historical Origins
1. "This Warm Scribe, My [Profitable] Hand": Agency and the Acquisition of Literary Archives
Christopher Fletcher
2. British Romantic Poetry and/as Cultural Heritage: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Robinson
Tim Sommer
3. Women Writers and Publisher Archives: Jane Austen and Beyond
Michelle Levy
Part II: Institutional Collecting
4. The Collections Cycle of the Modernist Archive Market
Amy Hildreth Chen
5. "Operation Manuscript": A National Institutional Response to Collecting Contemporary Literary Heritage
Jamie Andrews
6. Manuscript in the Writer's House Museum
Nicola J. Watson
Part III: Authors and Archives
7. Archival Anxieties: On Memory and Forgetfulness
Stephen Enniss
8. Archives as Texts and the Stories They Tell
Jennifer Douglas
9. Writers' Libraries and Vestigial Notes as Cultural Heritage: Minding the Gaps in the Material Record
Dirk Van Hulle
Part IV: Digital Archives, Digital Heritage
10. Capturing, Collaborating, and Curating: A Community-Led Approach to Contemporary Born-Digital Literary Archives
Justine Mann
11. Invisible Touches: The Challenge of the Hidden Revolution in Bookmaking for Publishers' Archives
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Index
About the author
Tim Sommer is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, an Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Oxford. At the University of Heidelberg, he was principal investigator on the project "Modern Literary Manuscripts as Cultural Heritage: Valuation, Archivization, Digitization" (2020-2021). His research on literary authorship, cultural heritage, and archival institutions has appeared in
Romanticism,
Book History, the
Journal of World Literature, and the
Harvard Library Bulletin, among other venues. His monograph
Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance was published in 2021.
Summary
Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving
Report
"This timely collection interrogates with a critical eye how we construct literary heritage and thinks about how such ideas might shape our future. Its importance lies in the essays' combination of heritage, literary, and archival studies to deconstruct the institutions that have authored our cultural understanding of literary archives."
Carrie Smith, Senior Lecturer, Cardiff University, UK
