Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive

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.

?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