Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive

Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-55829-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 266 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

Reihe: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sommer, Tim

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften, Archivwesen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.