Forthcoming Issues

Fall 2010 (Vol. 43.2) Charles W. Chesnutt, 2008: Making a Stamp on America—Mary Zeigler, Contributing Editor

In February of 2008, the anniversary year of Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s 150th birthday, the United States Post Office issued its Black Heritage stamp honoring Chesnutt.  His picture on the front evoked the same questions of doubt about his race, or his fidelity to race, in 2008 that they had in 1887 with the Atlantic Monthly short story “The Goophered Grapevine” and in 1899 with Boston’s Houghton Mifflin publishing two short stories collections, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories on the Color Line.  In February, 2008, members of the Charles W. Chesnutt Association met with Georgia State University students during a forum sponsored by the Office of African American Student Services and Programs to announce the unveiling of the new heritage stamp. When students received the flyers with the stamp, they were expressionless. And even though Chesnutt’s picture appeared on that “Black Heritage” stamp, the question still arose, “Is he black?”  Although the expected response, “NDUH-uh! The BLACK Heritage stamp?!” evoked some laughter throughout the room, that question was, indeed, a meaningful one, for it said that these university students had not been made familiar with a significant figure in their African American heritage nor in their American literary heritage through their current college studies nor through their past academic experiences.  Once again, the purpose for the founding of the Charles W. Chesnutt Association had been affirmed.

And thus the purpose of this special journal issue, to bring into awareness the unaware and to celebrate with the scholar, to foster an understanding of the interaction of Chesnutt with the social, economic, and literary world of his time and the legacy of that interactive impact on today's vision of American society.

Spring/Fall 2011 (Vol. 44.1 and 2) Depression in the Enlightenment —Richard Terry, Contributing Editor

This special issue will address the understanding and representation of depression in a range of eighteenth-century writings. This issue grows out of a prestigious interdisciplinary project being conducted in collaboration between Northumbria University and the University of Sunderland, neighbouring institutions in the Northeast of England. The project is entitled ‘Before Depression: The Representation and Culture of “The English Malady”, 1660-1800’, and addresses the question: ‘what was depression like before it was called depression?’ ‘Depression’ as a psychiatric term dates only from the middle years of the nineteenth century, when it acquired its currency in both medical and literary usage. Before ‘depression’, a wide range of terms had been employed to describe the mental and physical experience of lowness of spirits. One such, of course, was ‘melancholy’ which carried enormous weight both culturally and medically well into the nineteenth century. Another such was ‘hypochondria’, a term which rooted the experience of dejection in a specific bodily part, the viscera lying under the ribs.

The project explores the persistence of the depressive state of mind (still little understood) within British culture of the long eighteenth century. The Enlightenment period saw influential and lasting reorientations in literary, scientific, medical and philosophical discourse in Britain on the continent. The chosen period will allow for discussion of depression as a phenomenon of non-conformist spirituality in the mid-seventeenth century as well as enabling coverage of the emergence of literary and philosophical Romanticism at the end of the following century, with its new promotion of abnormal states of mind. In between, the project will consider medical and asylum accounts of depressive patients, the melancholic repercussions of the philosophy of pessimism, the impact on mental well-being of issues relating to work and idleness, and (related to the latter) the intersection of depression with issues of class and gender.

Spring 2012 (Vol. 45.1) Against All Authority: Anarchism & the Literary Imagination—J. Shantz, Contributing Editor

The lack of informed analysis of anarchist politics has meant that the actual perspectives, desires and visions of this major, and growing, contemporary movement remain obscured. Lost in recent sensationalist accounts are the creative and constructive practices undertaken daily by anarchist organizers imagining a world free from violence, oppression and exploitation. An examination of some of these constructive anarchist visions, which provide examples of politics grounded in everyday resistance, offers insights into real world attempts to radically transform social relations in the here and now of everyday life. This volume examines historical and contemporary engagements of anarchism and literary production. Anarchists have used literary production to express opposition to values and relations characterizing advanced capitalist (and socialist) societies while also expressing key aspects of the alternative values and institutions proposed within anarchism. A key component of anarchist perspectives is the belief that means and ends must correspond. Thus in anarchist literature as in anarchist politics, a radical approach to form is as important as content. Anarchist literature joins other critical approaches to creative production in attempting to break down divisions between readers and writer, audience and artist, encouraging all to become active participants in the creative process.

Fall 2012 (Vol. 45.2) Thomas Carlyle & the Totalitarian Temptation—Tom Toremans & Tamara Gosta, Contributing Editors

This thematic issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination brings together both established and emerging scholars in the field of Carlyle studies to address Carlyle’s paradoxical and often controversial politics from a variety of angles. A reconsideration of the political and ideological views permeating Carlyle’s work –ranging from his early aesthetic and social criticism to his historiographies and biographies– presents itself as a highly timely intervention, not only in the field of Carlyle studies, but in the study of nineteenth-century literature as such. Far from a belated attempt at apologetic restoration, the issue results from a shared conviction among the contributors that there is at present an acute need to critically re-examine Carlyle’s politics after the often uncritical assumption of his adherence to a totalitarian ideology that has dominated the twentieth-century reception of his work. The articles included in the volume span Carlyle’s career from his earliest writings to his biography of Frederick the Great, and re-examine Carlyle’s politics from rhetorical, historical, biographical, discursive, philosophical/theoretical angles.

Spring 2013 (Vol. 46.1) James Thomson's The Seasons, Textuality, and Print Culture—Sandro Jung, Contributing Editor

In the past decade renewed interest in the mid-ighteenth-century poet, James Thomson (1700-48), has culminated in insightful new work on the poem for which he is chiefly known, The Seasons (1730-46). The largest number of publications on Thomson's poem has concentrated on new-historicist, context-driven analyses of Thomson's politics and the identification of the poet's Whig ideology of patriotism; other articles have revisited the often discussed but inadequately explained form and generic hybridity of The Seasons. Scholars have little examined the unique publishing contexts of The Seasons in terms of the history of the book or the book trade, the sociology of reading, and the classspecific production of different formats of editions. This issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination aims to remedy this by investigating the importance of Thomson's poem in terms of print culture and the Genettian theories of paratexts and hypotextuality. The concept of the paratext, especially, is a useful tool for the study of The Seasons in that it enables scholars not only to consider the poem hermeneutically but also to extend discussion to include the meaning of page design, illustrations, prefatory material and annotation, as well as the paraphernalia that Genette includes in his definition of the term. The advantages of a discussion of The Seasons that leaves behind the strict disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism and invites the use of tools available to the study of book history and material textuality are clear: in making sense of the successful marketing and "repackaging" of a text such as Thomson's over a period of over one hundred and sixty years, scholars will gain a thorough understanding of the transformative impulses that booksellers/editors introduced to the poem to make it attractive to readers. In other words, examining the textual (and paratextual) "lives" of The Seasons will produce significant insights into areas such as literary history, canon formation, and the emerging discipline of literary studies at the end of the eighteenth century. Above all, an understanding of the social implications of representational forms/formats ranging from the elaborate folio edition of The Seasons of 1796 to the 24mo editions produced in the nineteenth century will help to develop more sophisticatedly the (material) text's map of reception and consumption. Also, it will shed light on booksellers' responses to an environment in which literacy rates were steadily rising and where book illustrations were becoming more and more integral to defining the modal or mentality-historical contexts of literature, especially if texts had been produced more than one generation earlier.