CFP for MMLA: Victorian Record-Keeping: Revisiting the Archive in 19th Century British Literature
British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?
