The Archives Project
'An archive can be any place, but for the archive to be, there should be too much of it, too many papers to sift through. And there must also be pieces missing, something left to find. The best finds in the archives are the result of association and accident: chance in the archives favors the prepared mind.'
Alice Yaeger Kaplan, "Working in the Archives", Yale French Studies 77 (1990), p. 103.
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'The Archives Project' is the umbrella title given to a set of initiatives and research projects linked through their focus on questions of scholarly engagements with personal papers held in public archives and manuscript collections. Centre staff involved include: Maryanne Dever, Ann Vickery, Sharon Bickle and Sally Newman. From Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and A.S. Byatt's Possession, through to Martha Cooley's The Archivist, novelists have attempted to represent the seductive power of writers' private papers over the readers and scholars who covet them. But literary scholars themselves have until recently shown a strange reticence on the subject of their own practices. The projects grouped here focus upon archival research into the more intimate aspects of women writers' lives. Among the questions that animate them are: how do we approach 'the intimate archive'? How can scholars travel the boundaries of the textual and sexual in private papers and correspondence? What new ways might there be to think about scholarly editing of primary sources? What might be gained through renewed focus on such elements as the materiality of such sources? How can considerations of the archive as a research subject in itself (rather than simply to site for research activities) reshape our work in this field? Individual projects here include:
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