Imagining the Archives
Imagining the Archives

Summary/Abstract: In Washington Irving’s “The Mutability of Literature,” the narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, daydreams while visiting the archive in Westminster Abbey. He imagines that an Elizabethan book, printed as a quarto, suddenly comes to life. The quarto speaks to him as a voice from another age, prompting Crayon to meditate on the process of inclusion and exclusion that characterizes the canon. His meditation reveals the archive to be a crypt where past voices are reincarnated, rather than a repository of the intellectual endeavors of dead authors. Crayon discovers that to browse through archives is to reanimate the dead and to encounter the ghostly presence of authors and of their fictional characters.

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