Category Archives: literature

Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies – The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market

Coming up on 21 January 2022 is the Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies presented this year by Amy Hildreth Chen, author of Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market (University of Massachusetts UP, 2020). She will be speaking on the topic of “The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market”. Abstract for […]

New books!

A quick round up of some new books: Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature by Paul Benzon Description: Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media […]

Reanimating Working-Class Writing

In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried […]

Poetry manuscripts: Two articles

Two recent articles from Alison Fraser, assistant curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo may of interest. Both focus in part on questions of materiality — the manuscript as ‘trash’ and the clipping. The articles are: ‘Creating the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives: A Short History of the Poetry Collection at the University at […]

New book: Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market

Just out from the University of Massachusetts Press is Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen. This new work will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the political economy of literary archives and how the US market for writers’ papers developed in the second half of the twentieth century. […]

Now in paperback: Spontaneous Particulars by Susan Howe

Good news that a paperback edition is coming in May 2020 of Susan Howe’s wonderful short book, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. Originally published in hardback by Christine Burgin Gallery in association with New Directions, this glorious tribute to the importance of being in the archive will hopefully now reach new readers. Spontaneous Particulars […]

Being a Terrible Archivist

For those of you currently stuck indoors, this podcast interview with Jenn Shapland may be of interest. Shapland talks about researching her new book on Carson McCullers which began when she started reading archived letters between McCullers and a woman called Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach while an intern at the Harry Ransom Centre. “They are in a […]

NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.

New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]

New book: The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives

A very exciting new publication from Princeton University Press is Melanie Micir‘s, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives.  From the publisher’s website: “Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s carefully annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes’s fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson’s […]

New book: Shadow Archives

Just out from Columbia University Press is Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. This title may be of interest for its central focus on literary archives and in particular how Cloutier “provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history”. More […]