Libraries, Literatures, and Archives
Edited by Sas Mays
To Be Published December 15th 2013 by Routledge – 192 pages
Series: Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science
Description
Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture – both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book history, the figure of the library remains in many senses under-researched. This collection brings together established and up-and-coming researchers from a number of practices – literary and cultural studies, gender studies, book history, philosophy, visual culture, and contemporary art –with an effective historical sweep ranging from the time of Sumer to the present day.
In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.
Contents
Introduction Sas Mays 1. ‘Index’ Geoffrey Bennington 2. ‘Under a Heap of Dust they Buried Lye, Within a Vault of Some Small Library’: Margaret Cavendish on Alternatives to the Library Emily Bowles 3. Outside of the Archive: Notes on ‘Libraries’ in Hitchcock Tom Cohen 4. Libraries, Memory, and Catastrophe in W. G. Sebald Rick Crownshaw 5. Early Modern Collectors and Editors and their Perception of the Role of the Codex Elizabeth Evenden 6. Magical Values in Recent Romances of the Archive Suzanne Keen 7. Classifying Fictions: Contemporary Libraries and Information Sciences Practices and Literary Criticism Michelle Kelly 8. Between Endlessness and Destruction: Bibliomania and Bibliophobia in the Works of George Gissing Sas Mays 9. Editing de Man Editing Martin McQuillan 10. That Library of Uncatalogued Pleasure: Queerness and the Archive in 20th Century Gay Fiction & Beyond Kaye Mitchell 11. Archive-ability Simon Morgan Wortham 12. Cataloguing Architecture: The Library of the Architect Andrew Peckham 13. Library as Representation: Two Archives of Folk Culture Dan Smith 14. Postcolonial Writing and the Archives of Empire: Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda’ Wendy Walters 15. Digital Libraries & Fantasies of Totality Andrew White Conclusion Sas Mays
Name: Libraries, Literatures, and Archives (Hardback) – Routledge
Description: Edited by Sas Mays. Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture – both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in...
Categories: Library & Information Science, Literature & Culture, Communication Research Methods, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies