Who Knew There Were Missing Parts of American Literature?

 Well, learn something new with Have You Seen Me?: Missing Works of Nineteenth-Century American Literature:

To students new to the study of nineteenth-century American literature, it may seem that the field has been so thoroughly studied and catalogued that there can be very little left to discover about it. This could hardly be further from the truth. The bodies of work of the most well-studied of American authors from the period—much less writers who are only just beginning to receive their critical due—are almost all incomplete. Indeed, it is probably a rare thing to study a writer who does not have works, either known or suspected, missing from their corpuses. This seems to be especially true of authors of the nineteenth century, for a few reasons.

First, the amount of material printed in that era was for the first time very large. The nineteenth century was an era of ballooning publishing numbers, awash in novels, poetry volumes, newspapers, literary magazines, pamphlets, chapbooks, religious tracts, monthly serials, penny dreadfuls, yellowbacks, paperbacks, and even a phenomenon eventually called the “bestseller”—giving scholars today a great deal of material to search through. Second, this material is more likely than earlier printed works to be digitized, since publications from the eighteenth century and before are fewer, rarer, and often in fragile condition, keeping much of this early material limited to physical archival storage. Third, more recent professional authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have generally adopted personal archiving and self-bibliography practices that make textual losses less likely, at least accidental losses. Thus, nineteenth-century American literature is particularly ripe for ongoing recovery efforts—especially concerted, collective efforts between and among scholars of the archives.

An interesting list, including Twain and Melville.

 

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