Readers for Style 2017–2018

Abstract

As you may have noticed from the masthead, I have been elected by the English Department at Northern Illinois University to become the new Editor of Style. While this role is new, I have been associated with this journal since the mid-1980s in one capacity or another: Book Review Editor; Co-Editor (with Prof Harold Mosher); Guest Editor of two special issues (Literary Character, 24.3, 1990; and Family Systems Therapy and Literature 31.2, 1997); Editorial Board Member; and now, Editor. I assume this new position with a certain amount of trepidation, given the talent and dedication of those editors who have gone before me (see list on page 1), but I intend to carry on their tradition of publishing the best work available in literary matters. My retired colleague, Craig Abbott, had done a wonderful editorial job for the last year or so, but he is planning to move and en prendre a son aise on the East Coast USA; consequently, he is turning the job over to me as publishes this issue, #41.1 (spring 2007). My own first major task has been a relatively easy one: completing work start by Prof. Abbott in seeing to fruition a guest-edited issue (41.2 Summer 2007) titled Style in Fiction, edited by Profs. Geoffrey Leech and Mich Short from Lancaster University in the UK. This special number contains essays focusing on linguistics and literature, including David Hoover's stylometry analyses of the writings of Henry James, as well as essays by Professors Geoffrey Leech, Barbara Dancygier, Elena Semino, David Hoover, Catherine Emmott, Anthony Sanford, Eugene Dawydiak, and Mick Short. Our next issue (41.3 Fall 2007), will be a general number, and the types of essays therein will look familiar to Style's long-time readers. has traditionally considered articles that analyze stylistic and related issues in literature and that propose and discuss methods and theories of analyzing and evaluating and language-related features. The journal has also welcomed arguments about genre/period/author styles, as well as essays devoted to theories of literature, linguistics and literature, literary conventions, andnarratology. In addition, now welcomes contributions employing the new psychologies: cognition, bio-evolutionary psychology, family systems, and human development -in literary study. Furthermore, the editors will be pleased to consider submissions on pedagogy generally as they relate to the teaching of literature and of the humanities. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, linguistics, philosophy of language, rhetoric, narrative, and composition studies as well as the varieties of psychologies and pedagogies that have recently become familiar to those engaged in the study of literature, in all cases, remains most interested in such essays as they remain close to the text. In addition to the matters discussed above, I also want to do something about a long-standing complaint I have had regarding the way the profession, through its literary journals, goes about disseminating ideas. I have noticed and have experienced myself a sense that, once an article has been published, it tends, all too often, to go into a kind of humanistic void where who-knows who reads it, or argues with it, much less employs it in his/her own work? Worse, how many readers discard it (or perhaps even disdain it) and so never think of it again. Hence, much of what every journal editor must do is gently to suggest to some contributors (and not necessarily junior authors) that they are, as it were, reinventing the typewriter because they have not adequately surveyed many of the ideas already published in other places. …