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Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of
Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural
meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to
public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular
moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes
Alberto Manguel's account of the Library of Alexandria as well as
chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of
prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the
slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the
personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson,
Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library
is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration,
dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and
public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and
interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive
studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and
publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical
poetics of the personal library within its extended social,
aesthetic and cultural contexts.
Sharing the Past is an unprecedentedly detailed account of the
intertwining discourses of Canadian history and creative
literature. When social history emerged as its own field of study
in the 1960s, it promised new stories that would bring readers away
from the elite writing of academics and closer to the everyday
experiences of people. Yet, the academy's continued emphasis on
professional distance and objectivity made it difficult for
historians to connect with the experiences of those about whom they
wrote, and those same emphases made it all but impossible for
non-academic experts to be institutionally recognized as
historians. Drawing on interviews and new archival materials to
construct a history of Canadian poetry written since 1960, Sharing
the Past argues that the project of social history has achieved its
fullest expression in lyric poetry, a genre in which personal
experiences anchor history. Developing this genre since 1960,
Canadian poets have provided an inclusive model for a truly social
history that indiscriminately shares the right to speak
authoritatively of the past.
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