DIGGING IN THE ARCHIVE OF VICTORIAN NOVELS

Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, 30 November 2021, h. 12.30-6.00 pm
Aula Confucio

Wednesday, 1 December 2021, h. 9.00-12.45
Aula Shakespeare

ORGANIZZAZIONE SCIENTIFICA: Silvana COLELLA, silvana.colella@unimc.it

PROGRAMME (pdf)

What Margaret Cohen has termed ‘the great unread’ is daunting in its vastness. Thousands of novels, produced in the nineteenth century, fall into this underexplored category. The graduate seminar Digging in the archive of Victorian novels presents the results of an experiment in literary archaeology conducted by MA students, over the course of the Fall semester 2021. Using Troy Bassett’s website At the Circulating Library as a springboard, the students were asked to select novels that have not yet been re-discovered, or re-published in modern editions, according to the genre or theme that most captured their imagination. The resources of digital libraries (Internet Archives, Hathi Trust, Europeana) helped restrict the selection to texts available in electronic format. The experiment relies on the creative and critical thinking skills students have deployed to decide what to select, how to ‘curate’ the recovered text and formulate their own hypotheses as to why a given novel is – or is not – deserving of attention.