Editorial

Abstract

In the opening number of our new journal twelve months ago, Laurel Brake invited us to consider the terms we use in our scholarship and the constitutive function they have in different fields of research. The move from the ‘article’ to the ‘essay’ as the common designation for a prose contribution to a periodical, she argued, was an assertion of the literary over the journalistic, with all the attendant connotations of authority and value. There is much more to say here, of course, and we are still some way from an agreed terminology for the diversity of items we find in the periodical press. But there is a further complicating factor that remained unspoken in that discussion point in our first issue, namely that of linguistic difference outside the Anglophone context.