Revenant Archive

The Revenant Archive, stewarded by Olchar E. Lindsann, attempts to chart and provide the materials for the detailed reconstruction of 19th Century avant-garde communities–a long, rich, and complex history that has been almost effaced from the communal memory of today’s Eternal Network of avant-garde counterculture. This DIY micro-archive is assembled, maintained, and designed to function as a co-ordinated part of the ongoing evolution of this alternative community–unfunded, idiosyncratic, and without institutional ties or resources.

Its sister project, Revenant Editions, publishes English translations of works by this same matrix of communities, many of those texts drawn from the archive itself. The journal Rêvenance publishes texts and translations from the archive alongside historical research, translations, and experimental historical engagement by living avant-garde historians and writers around the world.

The archive is also based upon a strong pedagogical foundation, and has been used for lectures and presentations at schools, festivals, galleries, and bibliographic societies, on topics including the practice of micro-archiving, the history of underground publishing, French Romanticist subculture, the history of avant-garde bibliography, and “practical bibliomancy”.

The archive began as a working research library, from the practical necessity of exploring a community, most of whose work has gone unprinted throughout the 20th Century. It grew out of a long-term project to re-evaluate the early history and evolution of avant-garde, subversive social and cultural practice. This research is anchored in the seminal avant-garde collective of 1829-33 known variously as the Bouzingo, Bousingot, Jeunes-France, and Petit-Cénacle, the first self-declared collective whose members are known to have referred to themselves by the term “avant-garde”. Though the archive focuses on artifacts relating to the 19th Century avant-garde, Frenetic Romanticism, and related phenomena, it also draws in related communities, individuals, and traditions from both intellectual and mass culture: Micropublishing, Gothic subculture, Feminism, mainstream Romanticism, Socialism, Decadence,  Libertinism, Anarchism, Civil Rights, Weird Fiction, Satire, children’s literature, etc.–whatever represents an alternative current or disjunctive intervention into the dominant stream of culture during the consolidation of Bourgeois power during the 19th Century.

The archive currently contains 607 catalogued relics.