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This article explores the nature of the newly emerging digital canon of American literature, a canon that is developing partly by design and partly by chance. Whether in mass‐digitization projects or in electronic scholarly editing, there is a strong predominance of electronic projects devoted to the study of literatures and cultures from the nineteenth century or earlier (copyright restrictions limit work on later periods). In addition, though some of the material needed for American literary study is publicly accessible, a significant amount of material is available only via subscription. Yet only some libraries can afford electronic access and only some users have university affiliations – thus the availability of information is limited significantly. Problems are especially acute for independent scholars and those at smaller or under‐funded institutions who often lack access to fee‐based resources. Ventures like Google Book Search admirably make massive numbers of books widely available to readers, but such projects lack the structures useful for advanced work. When scholars attempt to create a digital scholarly edition (sometimes called an ‘archive’ or a ‘digital thematic research collection’), and insist on rigor and a full critical apparatus, we trade Google's equalizing treatment of texts for a highly specialized and inevitably expensive treatment of a limited number of texts.

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