The Boundaries of the Literary Archive

Book excerpt: This volume offers new and challenging interdisciplinary approaches to the use and study of literary archives. Interrogating literary and archival methodology and foregrounding new forms of textual scholarship, the collection includes essays from both academics and archivists to address the full complexity of the study of modern literary archives. The authors examine the increasing prominence of archives and their importance to the interdisciplinary study of textual history in the 21st century, exploring both emerging and established areas of literary history. The book is marked by its attention to four distinct core threads that allow the authors to traverse a range of historical periods and literary figures: archival theory and textual production, authorial legacies and digital cultures, gender issues in the archive, and the practical concerns of archival research and curatorship. By offering an investigation of material from a range of historical periods within distinct methodological groupings, the volume seeks to encourage interplay between scholars working in different fields around similar essential questions of methodology, whilst presenting a rich account of archives worldwide.