Shelving Books?: Representations of the Library in Contemporary Texts
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[1] University of St Andrews
University of St Andrews
Reino Unido
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- Localización: Comparative Critical Studies, ISSN 1744-1854, Vol. 14, Nº. 1, 2017, págs. 7-27
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Established for over two decades, archive studies have often conflated the archive and the library, leading to the theoretical neglect of the latter. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, critical and historical works on the library have been on the increase. At the same time, a body of fictional texts offers a very specific representation of the library in the digital age. The literary libraries discussed here – a sample published post-2000, drawn from seven national literatures and representing various genres – champion the codex and construct the library as an affective, nostalgic material space. Acknowledging the ubiquity of digitization whilst nonetheless eschewing a simplistic material/ digital binary, they rework familiar tropes such as the universal library, the library destroyed, and the library as a symbol or repository of cultural memory. Finally, these are spaces of (gendered) familial psychic dramas, tracing oedipal conflicts, family romances and troubled transgenerational legacies.
