Introduction

A Round this Time Last Year, Ralph Cohen bid a short and characteristically modest farewell to his readers. In this issue, we offer a fanfare and an extended farewell to Ralph Cohen. We invited Ralph's friends, many of whom count amongst the most distinguished scholars in the profession, to reflect on the intellectual impact of the journal that he founded and to pay tribute to his accomplishments as an editor, scholar, and teacher. These essays are illuminating not only for the light they shed on Ralph's character and intellectual achievements, but also for what they reveal about the remarkable transformation of literary studies over the last four decades.

The issue is organized into several sections. We begin with a series of essays that situate New Literary History within the history of the profession and that highlight its innovative and distinctive features as a scholarly journal. These essays are followed by shorter, more personal reflections, often touching on the role that Ralph's mind and temperament have played in the author's career. A final cluster of essays draw on Ralph's inspiration in the course of developing a larger argument about theory or method in literary studies. The issue concludes with an interview with Ralph Cohen conducted by Jeffrey Williams.

The following tribute celebrates a culmination; it by no means marks a conclusion. Nothing emerges more clearly from these pages than that Ralph Cohen's impact on the profession of literary studies will continue for decades to come.