The essay focuses on the motif of the writers’s secret and un/retrieved papers as the object of a literary quest in a corpus which includes Henry James's The Aspern Papers as the archetype, Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down, Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, Ackroyd's Chatterton and A.S. Byatt's Possession. The motif is examined in the context of the cultures of collecting and the museological practices of literature in its status as a “cultural object”at the centre of dynamics of loss, desire, identity, heritage politics, “archive-fever”.
