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Archives, Authority, Aura: Modernism's Archival Turn
Archives, Authority, Aura: Modernism's Archival Turn
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What does it mean to know that, in this late stage, Waugh viewed
his own novel not as a whirling narrative cycle of decline and fall,
but in terms of the baggy episodic structure of the picaresque?
Or, indeed, that Waugh’s satiric version of late-twenties doom
and gloom—witnessed in the novel’s chaotic violence, dynamic
destruction, and gleefully sadistic satire—was originally conceived
far more bathetically as simple discouragement?
The Waugh papers at the Huntington likewise index a writer
at work, in their collection of publishers’ memos and profes-
sional correspondence. These show the breadth of Waugh’s
interest in the material conditions of professional authorship,
including issues of production and marketing. The Huntington’s
Waugh correspondence comprises six boxes in total, largely to
and from editorial staff at Chapman & Hall, Waugh’s publishers
(Boxes 3-8, Evelyn Waugh Papers), and mostly from the nineteen
sixties. Many of these letters detail Waugh’s often painstaking
involvement in the production of his late books, such as in deci-
sions regarding the design of A Little Learning (1961), includ-
ing dustwrapper color (carrot orange), illustration plates, and
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Works Cited
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Brown, Bill. Other Things. U of Chicago P, 2015.
Caselli, Daniela, and Caroline Patey. “Introduction: The Archival Turn in
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Caswell, Michelle. “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging
the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” Reconstruction:
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2016. Accessed 2 Aug. 2017.
Christie, Alex et al. “Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities.” 14 Nov.
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Prenowitz, U of Chicago P, 1996.
Evelyn Waugh Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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Gerson, Carole. Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private
Literature and Archival Documents. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001.
Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing. McGill-
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Hildreth Chen, Amy. “Finding the Modernist Archive: Why UX Matters.”
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nity.org/forums/posts/finding-modernist-archive. Accessed 20 Sept.
2018.
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Print+, 11 Mar. 2018. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/
posts/what-modernist-archive. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Kaplan, Alice Yaegar. “Working in the Archives.” Yale French Studies, vol.
77, 1990, pp. 103-116. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/2930149. Accessed 5 Nov.
2014.
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