Literary archives differ from most other types of archival papers in that their locations are more diverse and difficult to predict. The essays collected in this book derive from the recent work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, whose focus on diaspora provides a philosophical framework which gives a highly original set of points of reference for the study of literary archives, including concepts such as the natural home, the appropriate location, exile, dissidence, fugitive existence, cultural hegemony, patrimony, heritage, and economic migration.

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing— always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

How can literary archives adapt to the challenges of the future? Literary archives are per se international because their subject is international. Literature does not end at the borders of its country of origin or its language. Hence, literary archives hold material that is not limited to a country or a language, although one country and language is usually dominant. It might even be the case that an archive has the official task of preserving the literary heritage of a specific territory and is funded for this purpose. How can we conceptualize literary archives in their regional and global frameworks and develop them further? To what extent does digitization foster international cooperation within and beyond the archives and how can we make it more fruitful? How can archives meet the interests of the literary public and of researchers? With contributions by: Stephen Enniss, Lavinia Frey, Jeang-Yean Goak, Ben Hutchinson, David D. Kim, Stefan Litt, B. Venkat Mani, Nelson Mlambo, Sebastian Möring, Sandra Richter, Fred Studemann, Meike G. Werner, Katja Wiesbrock Donovan Literatur endet nicht an den Grenzen ihres Herkunftslandes oder ihrer Sprache, Literaturarchive verfügen also über Material, das weder auf ein Land noch auf eine Sprache beschränkt ist. Internationale Forscherinnen und Forscher fragen, wie Literaturarchive in digitalen Zeiten in ihrem regionalen und globalen Rahmen konzeptualisiert und weiter entwickelt werden können.

Introduction: Outside the Literary Collections Market -- Inside the Literary Collections Market -- Brand: Authors and Families -- Profit: Agents and Dealers -- Competition: Directors and Curators -- Provenance: Archivists and Digital Archivists -- Access: Scholars and the Public -- Conclusion: The Matthew Effect.

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history. Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

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.