Full-fledged academic professionals rarely appear as central questing characters in romances of the archive. As . . . A. S. Byatt's Possession suggests, earning academic job opportunities may be one of the rewards on offer for a successful quester such as Roland Michell, but his very marginality qualifies him for his role in the romance of the archive and allows him to carry on unnoticed long enough to get a good lead in the race against his rivals, the professional scholars. Romances of the archive typically validate the insights and abilities of popular writers, amateur researchers, graduate students, detectives, and (in general) those lacking professional certification in scholarship or permanent academic posts. An academic outsider makes a better truth-finder in romances of the archive. More intuiitive, more prone to risk-taking, more powerfully motivated to know than a mere academic, the quester in the archive is less bound by conventions, less hampered by respect for hierarchy, and less concerned about career and reputation. For these reasons, romances of the archive rarely overlap with "university," "academic," or "campus" novels satrizing the follies of professors and academic administrators on both sides of the Atlantic. [p. 30]
Links to Related Material
- Postimperial Romances of the Archive
- Postimperial Decline, the Romance of the Archive, and the Recovered past
- The Suez Crisis and Postimperialist Fiction
- History, Heritage, and Secondary School National Curriculum in the United Kingdom, 1970-2000
- The Postimperial British Debate over History versus Heritage
Bibliography
Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2001.
Last modified 24 September 2002