Volume 38, Issue 3 (1996)

Greetings from the New Editor of Criticism

For ten years Arthur Marotti led the journal with intelligence and a steady hand. He leaves Criticism a solid, well-known journal, open to articles that reach across fields, more interested in quality than in dogma or approach. We will work to preserve these qualities of openness and eclecticism.

In practice, this can mean staid papers on printing methods, or a gory issue like the present one, on cannibalism, decapitation, rape and mutilation, so long as even the sensational is approached with the tools of thought. We will also carry articles on comedy and evolution, on Japanese poetry, on poetry and economics; some articles take a feminist, or a cultural studies approach, some tend more toward explication de texte - all are well argued and solidly documented. What we want to encourage and preserve is this combination of the traditional and the unusual, this attention to the new that does not forget the established. In this spirit, we invite and welcome your articles.

There will be some changes. We hope to make the journal easier on the eyes and more noticeable on the shelf; we are considering publishing one guest-edited issue a year, dedicated to a single subject or approach; we will try to bring directives for submissions into line with changing technologies and business practices.

For the rest, we will try to be a journal that values intelligence, civility, pleasure, originality and scholarship, not too tall an order for the readers and writers that meet on its pages.