Abstract

Presenting material gathered at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), this paper’s primary focus is “John Brown’s Body,” a narrative poem about the American Civil War, written by Stephen Vincent Benét (1928). While an immensely successful and popular book at the time of its publication and well into the 1960’s, Benét’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem has since lost its status as a seminal work of American literature. This paper will use archival research to demonstrate the importance of textual scholarship, following a methodology called “narrative bibliography”. The combination of bibliographic practice and narrative analysis works to construct a compelling argument for the “virtual archive,” a literary commons wherein “John Brown’s Body” reemerges as a significant book in the tradition of American literature, and also serves as an example for the kind of stories that can be told about books in general--how they are made and come into the world. These fictions of the virtual archive contribute to both critical scholarship and cultural production.