Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Togetherness With The Past: Literary Pedagogy And The Digital Archive, Madeline B. Gangnes

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Archival materials are invaluable to an understanding of the historical, cultural, and material contexts in which literary texts were published. Materiality, paratextual elements, and other key characteristics of literature cannot be discerned from recent editions. Yet original and rare versions of literary texts are difficult or impossible for most scholars, let alone their students, to access. Digital facsimiles provide opportunities to examine archival texts over the Internet, alleviating logistical and financial barriers. In Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001), Carolyn Steedman writes: “The Archive is a place in which people can be alone with the past” (81); archives are …