Importance
of the Corvey Collection
As a collection and archive of British Romantic writing, and of Continental
Romanticism, the Corvey Collection is unmatched. Its holdings in the area are
more extensive even than those of the British Library: many of the
titles in the Corvey collection are unrecorded in the British Library catalogue.
Perhaps the most important focused collection of Romantic period writings in
America is part of the Kohler Collection of "19th-Century British Minor Poets"
housed at the Shields Library of the University of California, Davis. While
the collection at UC-Davis has been expanded significantly in Romantic-era volumes,
it is made up entirely of volumes of poetry, unlike the Corvey Collection, which
is especially strong in prose fiction. The sort of basic archival research which
the Corvey collection makes possible in the area of fiction will fuel Romantic
studies for decades to come, and will have a direct and dramatic bearing on
the shape and significance of the ongoing reassessment of Romantic writing generally,
in all the major literary genres.
Importance for Romantics Studies
The single
most important development in twentieth-century scholarship on the British Romantic
period has come about primarily within the last ten years, with the energetic
project of recovery of the writings of women writers of the period. British
Romanticism has for nearly two centuries been regarded as a thoroughly male
(and masculinist) literary and cultural phenomenon, historically represented
in England by five male poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley,
and Keats) and by the male novelist Walter Scott (Jane Austen, the one longstanding
canonical novelist of the period, has traditionally been grouped with "18th-century"
writers even though she was actively writing and publishing during the Romantic
period). The recovery of the works of the women writers, who were prolific,
well known, and widely read poets, novelists, and writers of non-fiction prose,
has meant that the entire literary and cultural "landscape" of British Romanticism
has had to be redrawn, a project that is in reality only just getting started
in earnest as the long-marginalized works of the women writers are again being
made available to scholars, teachers, and students. The Corvey Collection provides
a vast archive of materials that document the nature and scope of literary publication
in England during the Romantic period and that collect in one place uncommon,
scarce, and even unique materials for the sort of systematic comparative study
that will enable students and scholars to
continue to interrogate important questions of canonicity, peridoicity, and
aesthetics that have emerged in recent years in the study of British Romantic
literary culture. The consequences for the scholarly examination of French
and German Romanticism are no less dramatic; the availablity of the French-
and German-language materials from the Corvey Collection will have an equally
profound impact on future assessemnts of Romanticism in France and Germany,
as well as on the mutual influences of British, French, and German Romanticism
on one another.