Editorial

Abstract

A warm welcome to readers of this new issue of English , the third to be published since the journal became part of the Oxford University Press ‘stable’ and moved to a new academic home in the School of English at Bangor University. Those of us who form the current editorial team would like to express our thanks once more to the previous editors, Ken Newton of Dundee University and Peter Barry from Aberystwyth University, for handing on the journal with a strong tradition of lively scholarship and good poetry. We trust that our readers will find satisfaction and intellectual stimulus in this issue, which includes the final cluster of articles accepted by our predecessors, to whom we remain greatly indebted. The first and last articles on the following pages consider ideas of writing, death and memory. Jeremy Tambling asks what it means to take seriously Ruskin's own declaration in 1869 that thereafter his work was ‘posthumous’; if a work is born after the death of its father, is it set free from the authority of the past? In a reading of the letters collected by Ruskin as Fors Clavigera and presented as ‘fate and chance’, Tambling suggests that ‘the activity of writing is to generate memory in the writer, instead of memory generating writing’. Stan Smith enquires into the appropriate ways of commemorating W. H. Auden, a poet who was himself so aware of the militarisation of public memory that it can be difficult to know quite how to handle his own posthumous reputation. Focusing on Auden's The Orators and Isherwood's The Memorial , Smith explores the subversive qualities of these works which sought to undermine the national culture by which they have since been appropriated. Both articles confront the ever-present question of the role of writing, and enquire into the functions of memory and amnesia, whether personal or cultural.