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Speculative Archival Methods and the Victorian Miser's Queer Hoard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2025

Megan Ward Open the ORCID record for Megan Ward [Opens in a new window]
Megan Ward*
Affiliation:
Oregon State University, United States
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Abstract

Prompted by the gaps in archival evidence for writing histories of minoritized lives, scholars, archivists, and artists have increasingly adopted speculative archival methods. Shaped by queer temporalities, Black feminist epistemologies, and decolonial approaches, speculative approaches use techniques from narrative fiction to envision and reconstruct the past while acknowledging the limitations of documentary evidence. This essay seeks to expand the potential of fictional character for writing minoritized historical subjects by reexamining the institutionalization of archives in the nineteenth century and their effect on what counts as archival proof. To do so, it looks to the archivist's queer other, the Victorian miser. First, the essay reads Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) to show how the miser's hoarding challenges the desire to cash out an archival find while frustrating the researcher's desire for completeness and depth. Next, it moves on to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) to demonstrate the affordances of minor character for speculative knowledge, which has previously relied on the protagonist model for representing absent historical subjects. Through the figure of the miser, this essay embraces opacity and superficial intimacies as valuable approaches to depicting minoritzed figures of the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , Spring 2025 , pp. 1 - 22
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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