Imagining Lost Literature— Some Preliminary Considerations on Literary Extinction

Abstract

This paper examines how textual losses function as a creative space for reimagining the literary-historical past and promoting textual endurance. Research focused on book history has come up with new tools for studying destroyed books, but this article devises an alternative approach that investigates how textual losses invite fictitious supplements and creative rewritings. By focusing on three modes of textual loss—poetic fragments, intentionally constructed gaps, and extinct genres—this paper demonstrates how authors such as Ezra Pound have creatively engaged with literary forms of lostness. The paper suggests that much more work can be done on conceiving silences, losses, gaps and deaths within the realm of literature.