Gidiana Archives Project
GidianArchives : The André Gide On-line Press Archive
The `Fonds Gide´ of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris is the major archive collection of works and manuscripts by and about André Gide. It was initiated by Jacques Doucet and was greatly enriched when the author bequeathed much of his personal archive to it by the terms of his will.
Since then Gide´ s daughter, Catherine Desvignes-Gide, has added further items. A substantial element in the collection is an archive of press cuttings and articles which appeared in Gide´s lifetime on the writer and his work. The archive emanates from Gide´s own library of press cuttings, but it was added to and catalogued by Jacques Naville, son of Arnold Naville, an early bibliographer of Gide´s work. The collection consists of some 3000 newspaper and magazine articles encompassing:
- Reviews of all Gide’s literary works
- Reviews of his plays in performance
- Reviews of cinema or operatic adaptations
- Reviews of Gide’s critical works
- Reviews of his diaries and autobiographical publications
- Critical essays of a broader scope which appeared in magazines and reviews, in France and abroad
- Reviews of translations
- Polemical articles and exchanges ranging from ‘La querelle du peuplier’ (on nationalism and Barrès’s notion of ‘déracinement’) to Gide’s involvement with communism and his journey to the USSR.
The André Gide Editions Project, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Modern Humanities Research Association, set out to make this archive available in an electronic version on-line. The André Gide On-line Press Archive provides a unique set of perspectives.
Through this material can be traced not only Gide´s own literary evolution, but also the nature of the socio-cultural context within which he developed. The systematic study made possible by the existence of this archive offers fruitful work in reception theory as well as cultural history. The identity, views, development and diversification of professional readers of Gide´s work, and the nature and variety of the periodicals in which their reactions were recorded, provides scope for in-depth appraisals relating to the sociology, politics and institutions of the literary world in addition to its ideological configurations.
The mutual interaction between writer and readers is also crucial; the reception of Gide´s work reflects in part the nature of his readership, and readers´ reactions in turn can be related to the author´s subsequent writings. There are features of each which cannot adequately be understood without the extensive documentation on both which this archive provides.
What is at stake is not a parochial specialist interest : the description of Gide variously as `le contemporain capital´ (Rouveyre) and as a writer who called into question `the very notion of man on which we live´ (Massis), judgements which exemplify his enormous influence, make of Gide a kind of belwether for the age. By the same token the critical reception of his work provides a barometer of the cultural life and ideological agenda of an era.
The aims of the project are:
- To provide the academic community with an on-line version of the 3000-item press archive from the ‘Fonds Gide’ of the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, including bibliographical details and annotations, integrated with a search engine enabling investigation by key-word, and down-loading in electronic form of the results of searches.
- To stimulate and facilitate research into Gide, his work, and their impact on the cultural context.
- To stimulate and facilitate research into associated fields such as reception theory, cultural history, history of the press, sociology of literary dissemination, etc.
The objectives of the André Gide On-line Press Archive include:
- Provision of full bibliographical details on each item
- Addition to the collection where necessary of items known to have been omitted or deleted
- Classification of the articles by key-words to facilitate research
- Incorporation of a search engine permitting key-word searches, cross-referencing, and downloading of search results.
- Provision of a channel for publication and / or dissemination (in conjunction with the Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide) of work arising from the archive.
- Production of theses, publications, conference presentations arising from our in-house research into the material and the methodological implications of the work.