One of the most important literary discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century was the recovery of the spectacular library of more than 72,000 volumes, covering a broad range of subject areas, that was collected during the first half of the nineteenth century by Victor Amadeus, the Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenberg (1779–1834), and housed at his castle (Castle Corvey) near Paderborn, Germany. This extraordinary library remained unknown to scholars until the late 1970s, when its discovery prompted the University of Paderborn to begin systematically cataloging the belletristic works contained in the collection that were subsequently prepared in microfiche form by Belser Wissenschaftlicher Dienst. Remarkably, the existence of both the library itself and the microform records of its literary materials continued to be virtually unknown outside the University of Paderborn until the 1990s, when in 1994 Sheffield Hallam University (Sheffield, England) and Cardiff University (Cardiff, Wales) acquired for study and development the English-language belles lettres portion of this “Edition Corvey,” an archive comprising over 3,250 works by more than 1,250 different authors from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In real terms this collection contains over 2 million printed pages of English-language works, many of them comprising multiple volumes. The Corvey Collection thus constitutes one of the most important collections of British Romantic-era writing in existence anywhere. The extent of its scholarly significance is indicated, for instance, by the considerable number of exceedingly rare publications—and even numerous previously unknown works—by British writers (and women writers in particular, whose works comprise over 1,000 of the titles) who were active during the Romantic period. In addition to this remarkable trove of English-language literary texts, Gale's Corvey Collection of European Literature also includes 3,658 works in French (including more than 500 by women) and 2,653 works in German, all of them dating primarily from the period 1790–1840.

Importance of the Corvey Collection of European Literature

As a collection and archive of writing representative of British Romantic and early Victorian writing and of Continental Romanticism, the Corvey Collection is unmatched. A substantial number of titles in the collection are unrecorded even in the catalogs of the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Corvey Collection is especially strong in prose fiction, including Gothic and romance fiction issued by influential popular publishers like the Minerva Press (London). Moreover, because of the totally unfiltered manner in which the collection was assembled for its owners, it represents an extraordinary “snapshot” of the actual, highly diverse literary markets in London, Paris, and Leipzig (where most of the purchases were made) during the Romantic era. While well-known authors are of course represented in the collection, their works are far outnumbered by those of historically neglected and marginalized authors whose lives and works have become the subjects of scholarly recovery during recent decades, a recovery process that has in turn transformed the nature and direction of modern scholarship in British and Continental Romanticism. The primary textual and archival research the Corvey Collection makes possible in the area of fiction in particular will fuel Romantic studies for decades to come, and will have a direct and dramatic bearing on the shape and significance of the ongoing reassessment of Romantic writing generally, in all the major literary genres. Because so many of the works in the collection are exceedingly scarce, scholars of this material have historically been hampered by the expense involved in research travel to geographically dispersed libraries and archives. The inclusion of the Corvey Collection of European Literature in Nineteenth Century Collections Online obviates the need for much of this sort of travel while facilitating more effective comparative textual study and analysis from discrete electronic sites.

Importance for Romantic Studies

The single most important development in twentieth-century scholarship on the British Romantic period has come about primarily within the last quarter century, with the energetic project of recovery of the writings of the period's women writers and, more recently, of its laboring-class writers. British Romanticism was for nearly two centuries routinely regarded as a thoroughly male (and masculinist) literary and cultural phenomenon, historically represented in England by five male poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats) and by the male novelist Walter Scott. Jane Austen, the one long-standing canonical novelist of the period, has traditionally been grouped with “eighteenth-century” writers even though she was actively writing and publishing during the Romantic period. The recovery of the works of the women writers, who were prolific, well-known, and widely read poets, novelists, and authors of nonfiction prose, has meant that the entire literary and cultural landscape of British Romanticism has had to be redrawn, a project that is in reality only just getting started in earnest as the long-marginalized works of the women writers are again being made available to scholars, teachers, and students. Moreover, scholarship has begun to engage the vast and diverse body of popular literature by female and male authors alike, and by both “professional” literary writers and writers who wrote to sustain themselves and their families by capitalizing on popular tastes for Gothic tales, sensational fiction, and sentimental romances. The Corvey Collection's vast archive of materials documents the nature and scope of literary publication in England and on the Continent during the Romantic period and the early years of the Victorian era. The collection's strength in the 1820s and 1830s offers splendid resources for study of this insufficiently examined transitional period in British and Continental literature and public culture. It collects in a single archive a range of uncommon, scarce, and even unique materials for the sort of systematic comparative study that will enable students and scholars to continue to interrogate important questions of canonicity, periodicity, and aesthetics that have emerged in recent years in the study of British Romantic and early Victorian literary culture. The consequences for the scholarly examination of French and German Romanticism are no less dramatic; the availability of the French- and German-language Corvey Collection materials will have an equally profound impact on future assessments of Romanticism in France and Germany, as well as on the mutual and reciprocal influences of British, French, and German Romanticism on one another.

—Stephen C. Behrendt, University Professor and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska–Lincoln