The Corvey Collection of European Literature
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 Hess-Rotenberg (1779-1834), and housed at his castle (Castle
Corvey) near Paderborn, Germany. This extraordinary library remained unknown to scholars
until late in the 1970s, when its discovery prompted the University of Paderborn to begin
systematically cataloguing the belles-lettristic 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 the University of Cardiff (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 18th- and early 19th 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 500+ by women) and 2,653 works in German, all of them
dating primarily from 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 catalogues 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
numbers are far outweighed by the great numbers of works by 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 which 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 Romantics 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 women writers of the period, 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 longstanding canonical novelist of the period, has
traditionally been grouped with “18th-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 writers of non-fiction 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, peridoicity, 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