HeiConnect Modern Literary Manuscripts as Cultural Heritage: Valuation, Archivization, Digitization

The project is dedicated to researching literary manuscripts as cultural heritage phenomena, examining various aspects of how they are handled from the perspectives of literary studies, cultural sociology, economic theory, and the history of science. Conceptualizing literature as cultural heritage has a tradition in the history of ideas that dates back at least to the late eighteenth century, in which literature is generally presented abstractly as an immaterial form of expression. In contrast to this conventional description of literary texts, the research project deals with the concrete material and artifactual dimension of literature as cultural heritage, in particular with writers' manuscripts and their curation and reception. In contrast to a pre-modern culture of transcription, since around 1800 there has been an appreciation of the singularity of the author's manuscript, the origins and further development of which will be examined in more detail with regard to the three topics of evaluation, archiving, and digitization. The focus is on British and North American actors, practices, and institutions from the early nineteenth century to the present, while maintaining a comparative openness to other historical and geographical contexts. The aim of the project is to analyze the institutional, cultural, and social frameworks of modern literary manuscripts. This should advance the theory and methodology of cultural heritage research in the field of literature and materiality through dialogue between the humanities and social sciences.