Review: Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End, by Heidi Kaufman

Book Review| June 01 2024 Review: Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End, by Heidi Kaufman Heidi Kaufman, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 221. 45. David Pike David Pike American University David Pike is a Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of several books, including After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century (Manchester University Press, 2024), Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (co-authored with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi; Cornell University Press, 2023), and Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Cornell University Press, 2007), and is currently at work on a project entitled "Slum Lore: A Cultural History of Modern Urban Poverty. " Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 79 (1): 65–69. https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 79. 1. 65 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures Review: Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End, by Heidi Kaufman. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 2024; 79 (1): 65–69. doi: https: //doi. org/10. 1525/ncl. 2024. 79. 1. 65 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search I regularly teach a research methods course for first-semester college students. In the first unit, we work to shift our idea of research from proving a hypothesis that deduces solutions from a fixed set of facts to crafting a research question that moves inductively from what can be known to what emerges, and does not emerge, from the process of research, often by chance or accident. Heidi Kaufman's timely, painstaking, and brilliantly conceived project aims to do something similar with how Victorianists approach literary texts. Kaufman shows what can emerge to a researcher open not only to the built environment, the paratextual, and the ephemeral, but also to listening closely to what the data and its voices tell us and what they withhold from us, rather than "mining for treasures" (as Ann Laura Stoler puts it) that simply confirm our "aspirational narratives" (Stoler qtd. p. 13, p. 125). What I. . . You do not currently have access to this content.