Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900

The Institutions of Literature network will consider the hitherto neglected roles played by institutions in the development of literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most significant factors that marks this period as a crucial phase in the evolution of modern societal practices and ideologies is the progressive transfer of authority and fealties previously invested in individuals to organised societies and state bureaucracies. The profound impact of these developments on many different aspects of literature has not yet been granted due attention. Our network will address this lack.

In most common conceptions of the ways that literature functions, the author and the reader are dominant: one seen as the originator of the literary work, the other as its auditor and arbiter. However, individuals are not the only stakeholders in the creation and reception of texts. Since the early eighteenth century, institutions have played integral roles in literary culture: teaching people how to value writing; providing sites for discussion and networks for circulation; serving as archival repositories; raising and disbursing money; distributing laurels and condemnations; and authoring works and conducting readings. In addition to this immense - yet largely uncharted - historical significance, one of the most compelling motives for studying these institutions is their continuing relevance to modern society. The practices of the schools, universities, libraries, museums and organisations which mediate literature today were developed within the institutional cultures which coalesced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By studying the emergence of these practices, we can better understand our modern situations, appreciate the complexity of the lives of our ancestors and divine better courses for effectively employing institutional settings in the future.

The network will focus on three major functions of institutions which had far-reaching consequences for literary production: their roles as networks, as curators and as active agents. In three two-day workshops held in York, Birmingham and London, as well as in a series of online discussions, the network will explore the histories of individual institutions and develop a framework for thinking about the sets of social and cultural conventions through which the roles of literary institutions have become defined.

As well as inviting international and interdisciplinary scholars whose existing interests will feed productively into the workshops, we will begin the project with a widely-disseminated open call for participants in order to give all those interested in the work we propose to do the chance to join us. Recognising the ongoing implications of the historical practices we plan to examine, we will actively solicit the participation of institutions' current curators, administrators and librarians in all our discussions, seeking to draw on their experience of operating practices and configuring histories.

Each of the workshops will feature a combination of panels of academic papers, roundtables and discussion sessions. The latter will allow our participants the opportunity to explore the larger issues surrounding institutional influence collaboratively. After each workshop, we will publish reports of our discussions and will continue them via email and via a project website on which blog posts, recordings and position papers will be published openly for consideration and comment. At the conclusion of the project, we will put together a collaboratively-edited collection drawing together the work presented and ideas developed through the network. This collection will provide an enduring record for academic and institutional communities, serving as a jumping-off point for further scholarship from our participants and those inspired by their ideas and as a point of pragmatic reference for stakeholders in modern institutions.

One of the Institutions of Literature network's primary goals is to identify broad principles that will help to guide both students of institutional history and those currently working in institutions. This breadth of vision will be one of the network's most significant attributes, allowing us to bring together people whose work often focuses on specific moments in particular histories in order to consider larger patterns and formulations, both intellectual and practical.

Literature and culture are increasingly fostered in and mediated by institutions, which award prizes, set curricula, determine funding conditions, employ people and provide and require services. Studying the processes by which this situation came to be is of wider social interest for all those working in modern institutional environments. In looking at the ways that institutions came to be organised, we will draw out the implications for contemporary public and institutional policies and for locating creativity within our society. Understanding institutional histories can reveal the foundations and original purposes of the practices which have come to comprise considerable parts of everyday working life. The network will critically examine the development of processes like minute-taking, meeting, reporting, electing officers and negotiating within committees. Considering the histories of these practices will allow us to assess whether certain practices have evolved for contingent or outdated reasons and whether they might fruitfully be reconsidered in the light of social changes and new technologies.

The Institutions of Literature network will reach out beyond the academy through the direct participation of curators and stakeholders working at modern literary institutions, including libraries, learned societies and museums (details of participants who have already agreed to be involved are given in the Case for Support and the Pathways to Impact statement) By bringing acedemics and institutional stakeholders together, the network will ensure that the resulting scholarship is informed by the needs of both: academically rigorous, but engaged with the practical experience of institutional work and transmitted in manners that are open both in terms of minimising barriers to entry and avoiding unnecessarily specialised language.

The previous paragraph draws a distinction for the purposes of explaining the network's ambitions, but this distinction is in many ways an unhelpful one. Academics are, after all, institutional professionals, with modern universities being institutions of literature the practices of which are fundamentally grounded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foundations. Conversely, many curators and institutional stakeholders have wide-ranging and impressive backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences. We intend to investigate whether the commonly perceived differences between scholars and other cultural practitioners are products of the very processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation that the network will examine. Considerations of the benefits and limitations of such specialisation will comprise a major aspect of our discussions and will provide our participants and those our work reaches through the means discussed in the Pathways to Impact statement with new and informed ways of reflecting on our present modes of operation.