E D IT O R IA L E S C A N D IT S W AYS E v e r y three years, English Studies in Canada applies to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant in aid of publication. Last year the application, in addition to the usual statistics, required many pages describing the journal’s objectives, history, authorship, service to Cana dian scholarship, editorial practices, and reach. It occurred to us thrifty edi tors that such information might serve a double purpose: that in addition to swelling the archives of a granting agency, it might be even more useful in acquainting the membership of ACU TE more fully with the nature of their own journal, what it does, and why it does it. With the Executive’s approval, I have therefore rewritten the material of our SSHRCC submission, cutting redundancies and amplifying where I thought our members would like fuller information. Our object in the account that follows is not to rigidify present practice or suggest that it is the only way of doing things properly, but merely to make people aware of what their journal does so that, if change be con templated, it may be carried out knowledgeably. English Studies in Canada is the journal of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English. The objective of the journal is to provide a Canadian vehicle for learned critical, theoretical, and scholarly discussion of literature in English from its beginnings to the present. It therefore pub lishes articles on and reviews of books about everything from Old English to Canadian and Commonwealth literature. In this focus and spread, it reflects the interests of the association that sponsors it and which includes professionals working in all the periods and divisions of English. We try to represent this range of interests comprehensively and fairly. The average issue starts with an article on some author or aspect of early English and proceeds period by period from the Renaissance to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The approaches taken are similarly comprehensive, including tra ditional scholarly studies — philological, historical, contextual — as well as innovative and theoretical studies in the various compartments of modem criticism. The journal, then, is interested in the scholarly exploration of Eng lish literature in its widest sense, and also in the critical and scholarly instruE n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v , i , March 1989 ments and techniques by means of which such exploration may be conducted. The scope of the journal allows for study of large-scale literary phenomena in a significant body of material, study of individual authors and works, and examination of the principles and theory of literary study itself. In short, it is open to the whole professional and scholarly field of English studies, compre hending both the variety and the coherence of the major discipline it reflects. In its range and focus, English Studies in Canada is, I believe, unique, sub stantial, and of the first importance in the humanities in Canada. Given its range of material and readers, from medievalists to Lacanian postmodern feminists, I occasionally sense some uncertainty among assessors as to the degree of specialization that we should allow in any particular area. On the whole, and with some reservations, I take the view that any reasonably educated scholar of English literature should be able to follow the interests and intricacies of any part of the study, though he or she may not be avidly interested in all of them. I recall here, attending an Oxford sherry party where, with my usual social desperation, I tried to make myself agreeable by asking an Oxford English don what his special field of interest was. Fixing me with a smirk as of one about to apply the squelch definitive to a narrow, compartmentalized, and ill-educated colonial, American, or whatever, he smugly replied, “English literature.” How pleasant, as Twain reportedly observed, to have all the confidence of a Christian with four aces. Never theless, he was asserting, in however offensive a way, a soundly valuable point of view, that our...