Sprecher
Beschreibung
This paper examines the archival visibility of two women literary agents, Denyse Clairouin in France and Annie Laurie Williams in the United States, in order to ask what it means to “find” an agent in the archive. Their cases present strikingly different archival configurations. Williams’s professional activity is preserved in a substantial named collection at Columbia University, where correspondence, contracts, financial records, and client files make the agency legible as an institution and the agent visible as a professional actor. Clairouin, by contrast, emerges more obliquely. Her work as translator, literary intermediary, and foreign-rights agent must be reconstructed from dispersed traces in the archives of writers, publishers, and other agencies, including the William A. Bradley Literary Agency records.
Rather than treating this disparity simply as a problem of incomplete documentation, I argue that it offers a way of thinking about the archive of literary agency itself. Agents occupy a structurally intermediary position: traces of their work can be found in a wide range of documents including correspondence, contracts, and rights negotiations.
When no autonomous business archive survives, the archival record risks reproducing their professional invisibility.
By placing Clairouin’s distributed archive beside Williams’s institutional one, the paper considers how different archival formations shape the histories we are able to write. What becomes visible when an agent’s papers are catalogued under her own name, and what kinds of labour remain hidden when her presence must be inferred from the files of others? The comparison also raises questions of gender, professional identity, and archival description. It illuminates the transatlantic infrastructure of literary circulation, in which agents worked across languages, national markets, publishing houses, and media while leaving uneven documentary footprints. Ultimately, I suggest that “finding” literary agents requires reading not only within collections but across them, treating absence and dispersal as evidence in their own right.
Speaker Bio
Lise Jaillant is Professor of American Studies at the University of Lorraine, France. She previously spent two decades living and working in the UK and North America. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature, publishing history, archives, and the circulation of books across national borders. She has published extensively on literary modernism, book history, and archival studies, with particular attention to the relationship between authors, publishers, agents, and other intermediaries in the literary marketplace. Her latest monograph is Women Poets, Male Publishers: Myth vs. Market in Post-1960s Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). With Laurence Cossu-Beaumont and Cécile Cottenet, she co-edited the Book History cluster “Agents of Connection – Rethinking Transatlantic Book History” (in press). Her work also examines questions of access to archives, including born-digital and digitised collections. More information can be found at www.lisejaillant.com.