Published by De Gruyter

Volume 138 Issue 3

Issue of Anglia

Contents
Journal Overview

Frontmatter

Publicly Available September 23, 2020

Frontmatter

Page range: I-IV

Download PDF

September 23, 2020

What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections

Daniel Stein

Page range: 337-354

September 23, 2020

Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats

David Kerler

Page range: 355-383

Abstract

The article explores the interrelation of archives, melancholia, and their (de)constructive features in British Romantic poetry. It will argue that the proliferation of archives and archival practices from the late eighteenth century on had a strong influence on the literary‑cultural output of the British Romantics . This shall be scrutinised by drawing on an extended reading of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever” (1995) and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, focusing on two basal, closely related aspects: (1) the subject’s feverish desire to archive, and (2) the archive’s (self‑)destructive tendencies. A close reading of paradigmatic writers and their poems (William Blake, Lord Byron, and John Keats) shall illustrate that the notion of “archive fever” turns out to be especially determinant for Romantic subjectivity, aesthetics, and its sujets.

September 23, 2020

Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival

Tim Sommer

Page range: 384-403

Abstract

This article analyses narratives inspired by the institutional emergence of the literary archive. It focuses in particular on what historian Arlette Farge has described as the “allure of the archives”: the elusive immediacy of encounters with artefactual remnants of the past. Key to this experience is what has often been described as the ability of archival objects to conjure up the presence of their creators – a process that at the same time paradoxically depends on the uniqueness and fundamental ‘unapproachability’ of the artefact. Through regulating and restricting access to documents, the archive thus maintains their distance and simultaneously makes them available for acts of reverential consumption. Focusing on such forms of gatekeeping and consecration, the article reads Henry James’s novella “The Aspern Papers” (1888) and Martha Cooley’s novel The Archivist (1998) to enquire how the literary archive – both as an idea and as an institution – has shaped ways of thinking about the relationship between physical absence and auratic presence.

September 23, 2020

The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures

Alexander Starre

Page range: 404-427

Abstract

This article strategically resituates scholarly engagement with archival documents within the media ecology and the epistemic culture that sustains literary and cultural studies, noting affinities between historical and contemporary configurations as well as between theoretical and medial-material dimensions of archives. Based on current debates on the growing relevance of archival documents in American Studies and adjacent fields, it stakes out a framework that leans on recent work in a small branch of contemporary literary theory focused on historical epistemology, especially with regard to the notion of ‘epistemic objects’. Engaging these theoretical concerns, the article discusses concrete archival collections and documents, including letters by the novelist Willa Cather and items from a capacious archive documenting the emergence and evolution of Andrew Carnegie’s public library philanthropy. I outline several ways in which the shape and the aesthetics of such archives embody the information economies and epistemic situations of the past – in this case, the formative period around 1900. Finally, the article addresses the digital document overload that confronts the contemporary researcher and comments on the emerging archival knowledge culture of today’s humanities.

September 23, 2020

Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive

Katrin Horn

Page range: 428-448

Abstract

Arguing for gossip’s relevance in the archive, this article examines the surviving private material relating to Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876). Cushman was the most celebrated American actress of the nineteenth century yet spent most of her life in an expatriate community in Rome, where she shared her home with other female artists. Analysing letters, diaries, and related forms of life writing by Cushman herself as well as by friends and family, this article pursues two goals: First, it accounts for how a fear of gossip (by Cushman and her family) might have shaped the gaps in the collection concerning Cushman’s sexual and romantic relationships. Second, it makes the case for the archival traces of gossip as evidence in writing the story of Cushman’s intimate life. The article thus reflects on the role of gossip and privacy in “intimate archives” (Dever et al. 2010) and contemplates their relevance to Cushman as an insightful case study of LGBTQ history. Overall, this article advocates turning to the archive with a renewed fervour for evidence of intimacy as well as for turning to intimacy for evidence.

September 23, 2020

Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive

Michael A. Chaney

Page range: 449-467

Abstract

This article introduces readers to the enslaved African American crafter, David Drake, otherwise known as “Dave the Potter”, who incised poetry, signatures, dates, and sayings onto the stoneware ceramic jugs and plantation storage pots he made (from the 1830 s to the 1860s). In view of the concept of an archive, Dave the Potter’s works are significant as they are made up of writing and plastic arts, words and material. They not only record what has been thought through writing, they also perform through material languages of handles, spouts, bases, rims, etc. disruptions of the conventional functioning of the archive. If, as Derrida and others have argued, an archive confuses the content of cultural artefacts with the invested right of those housing an archive to interpret its content, then Dave the Potter’s incised jars perform this contradiction on their very surfaces, in their very design and construction, showing how the place or site of memory is also a house of hidden hermeneutic rights to remember.

September 23, 2020

From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive

Kristen T. Oertel, Renee Harvey, Diana Folsom

Page range: 468-493

Abstract

This project began with a deceptively simple question: “Were there runaway slaves in Indian Territory in the 1830 s and 40s?” The answer was complicated and relied upon the combined expertise of historians, archivists, curators, and collectors. This article describes how collaborative research, performed at the Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, uncovered a long-neglected piece of history in Indian Territory. The collections, which contain diverse sources such as manuscripts written on parchment, archaeological artefacts, original art, and more recently, digitised documents, images, and videos, shape the way scholars answer their questions. Although scholarly research may appear to be an independent endeavour – the professor mining sources at a desk or writing alone on a computer – the reality, especially in the twenty-first century, is much different. What shows up on the page and, now, what results in a podcast, is rooted in a shared journey, beginning with an archivist or curator collecting and cataloguing materials and ending in cyberspace.

September 23, 2020

“The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity

Birgit Däwes

Page range: 494-518

Abstract

In the Western cultural archive from James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘noble savages’ to Gore Verbinsky’s 2013 reincarnation of The Lone Ranger , Indigenous American cultures have, for the longest time, been relegated to the past and framed in representations that either displace them into nostalgic folklore or declare them conveniently vanished. While non-Native cultural products such as literary texts, photographs, and paintings, as well as museum exhibitions have coded Indigenous identities as static opposites to modernity, and thus deprived them of a future in Western culture, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and curators use these same cultural channels to contest the semiotics of absence, to assert cultural sovereignty, and to empower alternative modes of knowledge. This article considers tribal museums as interventional archives of knowing – in Derrida’s sense of both “assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve” and of “ con signing through gathering together signs” (1995/1996: 3; original emphasis). With examples from a Pueblo cultural context, including an exhibition at Disneyworld, Florida; the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum in Acoma, New Mexico; as well as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I trace the ways in which Native American museums strategically undermine what Mark Rifkin has termed “settler time” (2017: 9) and claim instead presence, sovereignty, inclusion, modernity, and futurity. In their specific outlines, these exhibits serve simultaneously as archives of Pueblo cultural heritage and as construction sites of temporality itself. 1

Publicly Available September 23, 2020

Speculative Bibliography

Ryan Cordell

Page range: 519-531

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article proposes speculative bibliography as an experimental approach to the digitised archive, in which textual associations are constituted propositionally, iteratively, and (sometimes) temporarily, as the result of probabilistic computational models. Speculative bibliography is offered as a complement to digital scholarly editing, and as a direct response to the challenges of scale and labour that will make comprehensive editing of digital archives impossible. Rather than acting on specific, individual texts, a speculative bibliography enacts a scholarly theory of the text through a computational model, reorganising the archive to evidence a particular idea of textual relation or interaction. Such models, in which textual relationships are determined by formal, internal textual structures, constitute bibliographic arguments that can be verified, amended, extended, or contested on either humanistic or computational grounds.

Reviews

September 23, 2020

Thijs Porck. 2019. Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History. Anglo-Saxon Studies 33. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 278 pp., £ 60.00/$ 99.00.

Stacy S. Klein

Article number: 000010151520200042

September 23, 2020

Francis Leneghan. 2020. The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon Studies 39. Cambridge: Brewer, xxi + 300 pp., 1 illustr., £ 60.00.

Leonard Neidorf

Article number: 000010151520200043

September 23, 2020

Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds.). 2019. The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 51. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, xix + 281 pp., $ 109.99.

Stacy S. Klein

Article number: 000010151520200044

September 23, 2020

Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins (eds. and trans.). 2019. Ælfric: Old English Lives of Saints. Volumes I-III. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 58–60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I: xxxii + 384 pp.; vol. II: vi + 426 pp.; vol. III: vi + 402 pp., each volume $ 35.00/£ 28.95/€ 31.00.

P. S. Langeslag

Article number: 000010151520200045

September 23, 2020

Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke (eds.). 2016. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Heidelberg: Winter, 305 pp., € 58.00.

Alexander Scherr

Article number: 000010151520200046

September 23, 2020

T. R. Johnson (ed.). 2019. New Orleans: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 379 pp., £ 35.00.

Juliane Braun

Article number: 000010151520200047

September 23, 2020

Christian B. Long. 2017. The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000. Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect, 300 pp., £ 70.00.

Jannik Müller

Article number: 000010151520200048

About this journal

Objective

Anglia. Journal of English Philology is the longest running journal of English studies. As a quarterly academic journal, Anglia publishes articles on English language and linguistics, on English literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on American literature and culture, on New literatures in English, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory. Reviews on recent publications in the research areas mentioned are included in all volumes.

Your benefits

Leading international journal in the fields of English Language and Literature
Extensive and prestigious archive dating back to 1878
High-quality and original research and review articles

Topics

English and American literature and culture
New literatures in English
General and comparative literature studies
Cultural and literal theory
Medieval literature
English linguistics

Article formats

Original Research Articles, Review Articles