Sprecher
Beschreibung
In 2022, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Miaïna Razakamanantsoa acknowledged the issue of investigating literary agents and representatives in archives, indicating that researchers’ work may, in this regard, ‘be influenced by the work of others, such as by former employees of the publisher and their filing preferences, but also by archivists and their knowledge organization strategies’ (C. Norrick-Rühl and M. Razakamanantsoa, ‘“Your Eyes and Ears on this Side of the Ocean”: Complicating S. J. Greenburger’s Role as Literary Scout and US Representative for Rowohlt Verlag in the 1960s’, Authorship, Vol 11:1 (2023)). In the previous workshop of this group, a recurrent problem was the definition of a literary agent and the difficulty of locating and accessing their archives. Drawing from these scholarly inputs, this paper investigates the impact that the fragmented nature of literary archives has on the study of literary representatives in charge of the circulation of English-language literature between the UK, the US and Italy. Locating and gaining access to literary agents’ archives is often challenging. Many of them did not leave archives behind or have fragmented estates. Because of this, scholars must often resort to publishing businesses archives. However, because literary agents and representatives liaised with multiple businesses, evidence of their activities is dispersed across numerous archival collections, each contributing to the reconstruction of their professional trajectories. Through the case studies of Charles G. Bode and Elaine Greene, I argue that each newly uncovered piece of archival evidence –often located in previously unknown archival collections – reshapes our understanding of literary agents’ and representatives’ professional trajectories. Therefore, this paper suggests that only through a responsible speculation approach these professionals’ trajectories may be satisfactorily uncovered and investigated.
Speaker Bio:
Cristina De Luca is an AHRC SWW DTP PhD student at the University of Reading and Bristol, and she is also a PGR Representative for the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading. Her PhD project aims to analyse the role of literary agents connecting Italian and British
publishers in the Second Post War Era. She is particularly interested in independent literary agents and female literary agents who represented Italian publishing firms. Prior to undertaking her PhD, she earned a BA in Modern Languages, with major in translation, and a MA in Modern Philology, with major in publishing, at the University for Foreigners in Siena. She has also worked for the Digital Sales department of Mondadori and is currently the Production Manager of the Postgraduate interdisciplinary journal Question – A Journal for the Humanities.