Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Rachel Blau DuPlessis The editors of jml recently decided to forego writing an introduction to an issue unless there is a special announcement, the better to have the maximum page space for the work of our contributors. This decision coincided, neatly, with our addition of abstracts and keywords to the articles—a professional boon to indexes and to scholars. But despite living in the age of condensed information, we'd like to linger over some very good news and to detail the distinguished careers of our newest editors and colleagues, Robert L. Caserio and Daniel T. O'Hara. We announce with pleasure and some glee that now we are six. Dan O'Hara, of course, had been one of the mainstays of jml before he took what turned into a several year sabbatical from working on the journal. We welcome him back and welcome another distinguished critic of modernism, Robert Caserio. Professor Robert L. Caserio has interests in nineteenth- and twentieth- century English and American fiction; the history and theory of narrative forms; and gay and lesbian literary traditions. He is Professor of English at Penn State University and headed that department from 2002 to 2007. Author of The Novel in England 1900–1950: History and Theory (Twayne-Prentice Hall Macmillan, 1999) and of Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period (Princeton University Press, 1979), currently he is editing The Cambridge Companion to the 20th Century English Novel for Cambridge University Press. The Novel in England 1900–1950 was a co-winner of the 2000 George and Barbara Perkins Prize, awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature for studies of narrative. His most recent chapters in books include: "James, Cather, Vollmann and the Distinction of Fiction," in Fiction's Present, eds. R. M. Berry and Jeffrey DiLeo (SUNY Press, 2007); "Queer Fiction: Ambiguous Emergence of a Genre" in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James English (Blackwell); and "Georgians to Edwardians" in The Cambridge History of 20th Century English Literature, eds. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus (Cambridge University Press). [End Page v] Daniel T. O'Hara, Professor of English and First Mellon Term Professor of Humanities at Temple University, is the author of five books, variously on Yeats, visionary theory, Lionel Trilling, and radical parody. His most recent work is Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America (Duke, 2003), concerning the relationship of contemporary critical identity and globalization. He is also the editor or co-editor of five books, including (with Geoffrey Hartman), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Fordham, 2004), which was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for the best volume of criticism for that year. The author of many essays on critical theory and modern literature in leading journals, he is currently completing a book entitled The Worldly Apocalypse: Global America and Everyday Life (The Ohio State University Press, forthcoming). At Temple University, he has served as Director of Graduate Studies, Undergraduate Director, and Chair of the English Department. He is also the review editor and a founding editorial collective member of boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture as well as a member of the editorial board of Annals of Scholarship. When he served on jml prior to this return, O'Hara was, in fact, both an editor and book review editor. This latter task passed from him to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and has just passed again, in an approximate two year rotation, to Jean-Michel Rabaté. Copyright © 2007 Indiana University Press