The poet Wendy Cope has sold her archive to the British Library for £32,000, a bounty that includes everything from letters, diaries and drafts to more than 40,000 emails.

John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, of the Bodleian Library, consider whether emails really denote a digital form of art, and what impact the email will have for future literary research.

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