Close
In its third year of publication, Moveable Type聽continues the tradition of publishing selected papers from the annual 果冻影院 English postgraduate conference.
Papers from the 2007 conference, 'Archives: From Memory to Event', explore the archive in theory and practice. As the conference title suggests, this issue considers the archive as both a compilation of historical events as well as an instigation of new events through assembled narratives. Such a consideration draws from Foucault's conception of the archive as an expansion of material and ideas, as 聽'the system of the formation and transformation of statements'. These papers also explore whether the archive is a place or a set of ordering principles, or whether it operates simultaneously as both place and principle; whether it is actual, or virtual, or both.
The keynote speakers from the 2007 conference present two apt perspectives of the archive: Helen Freshwater, a lecturer at Birkbeck College, provides an academic researcher's perspective, whereas Dorothea McEwan, cataloguer of the Aby Warburg Correspondence at the Warburg Institute, gives us that of a practicing archivist. The conference panels, too, were comprised of both researchers and archivists. The presenters' diversity of perspectives is further evident in that they hailed from Finland, Germany, Poland, Scotland, Spain, the US, and from various universities in England.
In designing the journal, we have incorporated images from the Special Collections digital archive of the 果冻影院 Library Services. One image in particular emphasises the potential of discovery within the archive. An original poem manuscript handwritten by Lord Byron was recently discovered inside a nineteenth-century book in 果冻影院's Special Collections-thus enhancing Byron scholarship and altering the previous belief that this manuscript was lost or destroyed. Other images of type through the centuries of print, as well as handwritten manuscripts and illuminations, are here used as illustrations, yet stand alone as subjects in themselves that deserve their own scholarly enquiry.
In addition to publishing conference papers, Moveable Type聽features reviews written by postgraduate students worldwide. This issue includes opinion on both novel and film and further accentuates the place of personal opinion alongside scholarship.
Kim Howey, 2007 editor