Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive

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.

“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

• List of ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Literature, Heritage, ArchiveTim SommerPart I: Historical Origins1. “This Warm Scribe, My [Profitable] Hand”: Agency and the Acquisition of Literary ArchivesChristopher Fletcher2. British Romantic Poetry and/as Cultural Heritage: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary RobinsonTim Sommer3. Women Writers and Publisher Archives: Jane Austen and BeyondMichelle LevyPart II: Institutional Collecting4. The Collections Cycle of the Modernist Archive MarketAmy Hildreth Chen5. “Operation Manuscript”: A National Institutional Response to Collecting Contemporary Literary HeritageJamie Andrews6. Manuscript in the Writer’s House MuseumNicola J. WatsonPart III: Authors and Archives7. Archival Anxieties: On Memory and ForgetfulnessStephen Enniss8. Archives as Texts and the Stories They TellJennifer Douglas9. Writers’ Libraries and Vestigial Notes as Cultural Heritage: Minding the Gaps in the Material RecordDirk Van HullePart IV: Digital Archives, Digital Heritage10. Capturing, Collaborating, and Curating: A Community-Led Approach to Contemporary Born-Digital Literary ArchivesJustine Mann11. Invisible Touches: The Challenge of the Hidden Revolution in Bookmaking for Publishers’ ArchivesMatthew G. KirschenbaumIndex