Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse

About the Author Rachel Bryant Davies is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and an Early Career Associate with the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (2018).Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler Chair of Modern History at the University of Essex, UK.Erin Johnson-Williams is Assistant Professor at Durham University, UK. She is also Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.Rohan McWilliam is Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and author of Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England and the editor (with Kelly Boyd) of The Victorian Studies Reader (2007).Sasha Handley is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK. Product Description Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined?This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies.Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.