Dr. Tim Sommer: Postwar Paper Fictions and the Rise of the Modern Literary Archive

The decades following the end of World War II saw an unprecedented surge of interest in the papers of modern and contemporary writers. On both sides of the Atlantic, archival institutions such as national libraries and academic special collections departments were beginning to acquire such manuscript material in a systematic fashion. This talk explores the transatlantic competition that stimulated these institutional developments in the 1950s and 1960s and charts their impact on archive-themed anglophone literary fiction published during the period.