Editor's Fence

EDITOR'S FENCE 1. H.G. Wells Imminent: In the best of all possible publishing worlds, I would have printed essays on H. G. Wells in this number of ELT, which begins its thirtieth year. Many interesting articles on other turn-of-the-century figures, however, have journeyed our way recently, some of which include primary materials. I decided to give the Wells a bit more time, not coincidentally, too, since the 1 October 1986 deadline seemed somewhat Panglossian on my part. Still, readers may look forward to perusing, among others, these essays in the third number: "The De-Forming In-Structure of Wells's The Wonderful Visit and The Sea Lady" (William J. Scheick); "H. G. Wells: Problems of An Amorous Utopia" (John Huntington); "Wells, Jung and the Persona" (Michael Draper); "H. G. Wells's Re-Vision of Poe: The Undying Fire and Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island' (Catherine Rainwater). In 30:4 we will present articles on a variety of figures: "Lionel Johnson's Letters to Charles Sayle" (Murray Pittock); "Music and Hardy's Poetry" (P. E. Mitchell); "Suited for Satire: Butler's Re-tailoring of Sartor Resartus in The Way of All Flesh" (Greg Sieminski), among others. Both 30:3 and 4 will of course offer reviews of books that are important to research in our field. I can mention but a few titles: J. B. BuUen's The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy; Pamela L. Jekel's Thomas Hardy's Heroines: A Chorus of Priorities; Karen McLeod's Henry Handel Richardson: A Critical Study; Martha Vogeler's Frederick Harrison: The Vocation of a Positivist; Kelly and Domvilles' The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats; Harold Orel's The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre; Samuel A. Weiss's Bernard Shaw's Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch; Dan H. Laurence's Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1911-1925; Stanley Weintraub's Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897; Stephen B. Oates' Biography as High Adventure; Andrew Rutherford's Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889. 2. A Reminder to Contributors: Though ELT publishes reviews of works on James, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Yeats, please do not send articles on them, since they are well served by other periodicals. We welcome the chance to evaluate essays on writers for whose sake ELT was created, figures Hal Gerber and his colleagues established as ELT authors in an effort to define the matrix of Late Victorian and Edwardian studies between 1880 and 1920. Although by no means is it comprehensive, a list of so-called "ELT authors" is printed on pages 4 and 5 of this issue. 3. ELT Press: In the fall issues Prof. Case and I will have important announcements on titles and publication dates. We are in the process of finalizing arrangements for an English publisher to distribute our authors' books in Europe and Japan. Anyone who has a book-length study on an ELT figure or work is invited to submit it to ELT Press, Department of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC 27412-5001. Please address a cover letter to me, outlining the aims of your work. 4. Desktop Publishing: I've had several enquiries about ELTs laser printed format. The decorous thing to do, it seems, is to refer to this fascinating subject as briefly as possible. For the present I suppose confusion is the byline to desktop publishing, just as it was a few years ago for us newcomers to personal computers, when a plethora of companies made available an unreasonable number of models at terribly reasonable prices: which to buy and what software to use? What you see on these pages is first composed with Wordstar (3.3) on an IBM compatible machine and then converted through a program called MacBridge to achieve the final copy—via an Apple laser printer. As with most computer programs there are curious limitations. For example, with the WordstarMacBridge -Apple configuration we cannot indent paragraphs, if we also want the text right justified, which we do. But then such "limitations" are acceptable, particularly when camera-ready copy such as this can be produced for a fraction of the...