This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics
of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or
working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century
when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as
an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by
deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors
have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich
have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have
squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind
exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet
them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel
or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where
precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern
literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish. In a series
of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency
and its capacity to provoke passion-a capacity ever more to the
fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via
word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such
quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts
as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript
as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might
mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of
Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and
Jane Austen-writers from the first great period of manuscript
survival-are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's
record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future
Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving,
Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.
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