Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive

Tim Sommer is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau. 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.

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