Critical information literacy asks reflective questions about how information is selected, made accessible, distributed, and preserved. When connected with theoretical conflicts in their discipline, critical information literacy can engage students with problem-posing questions about knowledge, authority and information. Librarianship and literary history are not value-neutral endeavors and we need to engage students with reflective questions about the values and decisions that inform physical and digital libraries and the narrative of literary history. In this paper, I use the example of novelist Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866) to illustrate such an approach in a literature classroom. In 1854, Cummins published The Lamplighter, one of the most successful novels of the nineteenth century. In spite of her prominence, Cummins and her novel hovered on the brink of obscurity for most of the twentieth century. It was thought in the late twentieth century that digital technologies could reclaim lost historical voices like Cummins’s and make them accessible to new generations of scholars and readers.The example of Cummins (and countless others like her) is not only a site of inquiry for literary scholars but is a rich space for classroom inquiry into the theories and practices of critical information literacy.
