Stauffer 2003

Andrew Stauffer. "Victorian Paperwork." Victorian Poetry 41.4 (Winter 2003), 526-31. Print.

• 526 starting with the passing of living Victorians beyond living memory: "The current historicist and cultural-materialist leanings of scholarship on Victorian literature surely represent a collective attempt to stem this tide of forgetting...it seems we postmodern Victorianists, like our subjects, find a strangely anxious satisfaction in confronting issues of legacy and loss."
• ...Paper allows for the most immediate communion beyond death.
  • tying in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam, Swinburne remembering Baudelaire in "Ave atque Vale"
• 527 The question, "Whither Victorian poetry?" [Title of this issue] asks us to envision a location: we should take this literally by considering the places -- that is, the textual, bibliographical vehicles and forms -- in which we find Victorian poetry[.]
• ... the study of Victorian poetry will only flourish while we remember that editorial work and textual criticism are not optional, second-order exercises[.]
  • he names "unedited" poets at that time like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Clough but it goes for older editions as well, e.g. Tennyson, which Ricks himself wants a new edition of
• digital archives -- e.g. The Rossetti Archive
• 528 impt point: not just recreating textual paradigms online: "We need to realize that the critical act need not be fixed to the rhetorical procedures enjoined by the printed page, especially when the materials of study have been explicated in a digital environment where radically different interpretational procedures are possible."
  • expanded upon by Mussell 2012
• Robert Browning about the "restorative" properties of a book (Bk 1 ln. 85, 89-90): "His comment implies two stories, one about the power of historical documents to call forth vanished worlds, to restore them to an almost palpable presence, and another about the salutary, restorative influence that books as things have in our imaginative selves."
  • also the "I' the touch": this symbol of information embedded in written language "...Becomes a metaphor for our perception of verbal works of art, and offers strong evidence that it is only by attending to the particular textual features of a poem that we will knownkt at all."
  • historicity of the salutary bit discussed in Lynch 2015
• 529 Their documents are more than containers of verbal reports on what it was like to be Victorian, they are the physical scars left by conflicts we have inherited. As such, they constitute knowledge requiring preservation and interpretation.
• Indeed, from one vantage...the British empire under Victoria was fairly constituted as a vast network of circulating, accumulating documents.
  • He cites Richards' Imperial Archive but also Hofmeyr & Burton 2014 et al.
• 530 Our criticism will profit by finding an interpretive method involved with bibliography and textual studies, one that can make rich sense of the changing forms and functions of literary works as constituted in physical materials and social networks. The gift book trade, the lending library system; the middle-class periodical press, the serial novel, the illustrated magazine, the socio-political tract, the modern scholarly edition: so many bookish phenomena that the Victorians refined or invented -- and so were invented by them.
  • Price 2000, Piper 2009, McGill 2013, Lynch 2015, Cambridge History of Libraries, Altick 1957, Sutherland 1976, Hughes and Lund 1991, all periodical sources connected in there