Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices Between the Analogue and the Digital

What is the history of literary papers and how they became valuable? What role do they play in authors’ legacies? What is their importance to national identity? These are some of the topics considered in Tim Sommer’s edited collection Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive, which explores the evolution, uses, and significance of literary archives. Focusing on Anglo-American modern literary archives from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the book comprises eleven essays arranged chronologically, covering historical origins, institutional collecting, authors and archives, and digital archives and heritage.The history of literary archives, and the value we place on them, is relatively recent. In “This Warm Scribe, My Profitable Hand,” Christopher Fletcher cites the nineteenth century as the earliest period of interest in preserving such material, spurred by the celebrity of Romantic writers and the growing significance of the autograph manuscript. Similarly, in “Manuscript in the Writer’s House Museum,” Nicola J. Watson identifies Romanticism as the period when readers began to understand visiting authors’ homes and being in the presence of their personal papers and belongings as a way to experience a connection with them. This new focus on the literary manuscript, she contends, happened alongside and in response to the rise of the mass-produced print book. Previously thought of as detritus, the manuscript was now prized by collectors for “offering an especially valuable, intimate, and authentic site of encounter between author and an individualized reader” (134).As writers’ materials became desirable and a literary archive market developed, the personal collecting of the nineteenth century expanded to institutional collecting in the twentieth century. Amy Hildreth Chen traces the rise and decline of academic institutions’ interest in modernist material in “The Collections Cycle of the Modernist Archive Market.” According to Chen, libraries had previously focused on collecting older English and European works but, during the 1930s and 1940s, started prioritizing the papers of modernist writers. These materials were “commonplace and cheap” (98), making them particularly attractive to university librarians who were aggressively working to build and distinguish their newly established special collections.Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the history of literary manuscripts is the growing awareness among writers by the mid-twentieth century of the value of their material, monetary and otherwise, and the related stories of how some navigated the tension between promoting their legacy and revealing secrets or unflattering truths. In “Archival Anxieties: On Memory and Forgetfulness,” Stephen Enniss sees establishing an archive as an act of storytelling and self-fashioning not unlike memoir and autobiography. Although this work may not be evident to researchers, considerable effort often goes into selecting materials and shaping an archive long before it goes to an institution, and what is omitted is just as significant as what is included. He notes multiple examples of writers who destroyed material in hopes of obliterating the facts they contained, including, perhaps most famously, T. S. Eliot’s destruction of Emily Hale’s love letters. This did not, however, prevent Hale from preserving his correspondence and depositing it at Princeton University, a reminder that “every archive is a contested site” (164). Similarly, in “Archives as Texts and the Stories They Tell,” Jennifer Douglas considers the motives of loved ones in shaping a deceased writer’s papers. She describes how the decisions of Aurelia Plath, Sylvia Plath’s mother, were driven in part by wanting to depict their relationship in a positive light and also refute the perception, perpetuated by Ted Hughes and others, of her daughter as an unstable depressive.Literary archives such as Eliot’s and Plath’s are the raw material essential for biographers, historians, and literary scholars to produce new work. Two chapters in this volume consider such collections as research material. Michelle Levy’s “Women Writers and Publisher Archives” offers strategies for doing archival research when a writer’s archive has not survived. Her case study focuses on Jane Austen, an author whose canonical status belies a relatively modest amount of extant documents. While manuscripts and correspondence are often considered the most useful materials for research, Levy demonstrates the value in working with less obvious sources, such as bank records, publisher records, advertisements, and copyright documents. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s “Invisible Touches: The Challenges of the Hidden Revolution in Bookmaking for Publishers’ Archives” offers a fascinating discussion of the changes in publishers’ archives in the twenty-first century and its potential impact on research. Noting that digital files and their workflows present major challenges for institutional collecting and access, he warns that “broad swaths of publishing history—and by extension, literary, cultural, and social history—are currently at risk” (238).By the latter half of the twentieth century, a writer’s papers also became understood as a form of cultural heritage and potentially significant to national identity and pride. While historically acquisition of literary papers had been driven by competition, some institutions were compelled to take a collaborative approach. Jamie Andrews’s “‘Operation Manuscript’: A National Institutional Response to Collecting Contemporary Literary Heritage” documents the National Manuscript Collection of Contemporary Poets (later the National Manuscript Collection of Contemporary Poets), begun in the 1960s as a collective effort between British organizations to collect the material of living (primarily British) writers. This project was established in response to the mounting threat of losing material to American institutions. Thus, as the literary archives market developed and competition grew, in some instances, joining forces to secure materials became an effective strategy for keeping papers in the country in which they were created.Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive is a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on literary archives, including Kathyrn Sutherland’s Why Modern Manuscripts Matter (2022), Amy Hildreth Chen’s Placing Papers (2020), and The Future of Literary Archives edited by David C. Sutton with Ann Livingstone (2018). The collection will be of particular interest to special collections professionals, book historians, literary scholars, and readers who want to learn more about the history, significance, and uses of these materials. Collectively, the essays reveal the different ideas about the value of literary manuscripts and how that has evolved over the past two hundred years, from offering a feeling of connection with the writer to prestige for an institutional collection, a means of preserving a writer’s legacy, resources for new research, and an assertion of national identity and cultural heritage.