Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of le mal d’archive, this study explores the interrelations between the experience of loss, melancholia, archives and their (self-)destructive tendencies, surfacing in different forms of spectrality, in selected poetry of British Romanticism. It argues that the British Romantics were highly influenced by the period’s archival fever – manifesting itself in various historical, material, technological and cultural aspects – and (implicitly) reflected and engaged with these discourses and materialities/medialities in their works. This is scrutinized by focusing on two basal, closely related facets: the subject’s feverish desire to archive and the archive’s (self-)destructive tendencies, which may also surface in an ambivalent, melancholic relishing in the archived object’s presence within its absence. Through this new theoretical perspective, details and coherence previously gone unnoticed shall be laid bare, ultimately contributing to a new and more profound understanding of British Romanticism(s). It will be shown that the various discursive and material manifestations of archives and archival practices not only echo the period’s technological-cultural and historical developments along with its incisive experiencing of loss, but also fundamentally determine Romantic subjectivity and aesthetics.

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century—with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment—did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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.

When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time – the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place, and the history of the discipline itself. Since literary studies engage contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must also acknowledge processes and events outside the field. The contributions to this volume engage with the idea of temporality not only in Anglophone literature studies, but in the humanities as a whole. In the first section, the literary contributions show that the humanities owe a debt to the past – new paradigms question and challenge the validity of older ones without necessarily discarding them. The second section shows how the disciplinary archive can be modified and expanded to engage its present condition, while the last deals with what that condition forebodes. Despite the range of perspectives adopted here, all contributions echo the history of the discipline of literary studies itself, its present condition, and the possibilities for its survival in an age in which the relevance of humanities is being disputed.

This book explains why 'fracture' and 'fragmentation' are two critical concepts that are particularly suited to understanding what is special about Romanticism. The book also discusses how Romanticism comes to be both an historical as well as a philosophical category, and offers new readings of key Romantic writers.

The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.

Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined? This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies. Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.

Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism. Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.