Editor's Introduction to the Special Issue

With this issue we bring to a close our celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of this magazine in 1911. Originally an annual called Studies in English, this journal, like many in the early years of the last century, published monographs by its own university's faculty. By 1924, while still an annual, it had evolved into publishing multiple scholarly essays, though again mainly by University of Texas faculty. The twenty-first century version of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, is, of course, published quarterly and has both an international advisory board and an international roster of authors; it is also one of only a handful of journals still extant whose purview is not limited to a special period (such as Romanticism or American literature), genre (such as the novel), or theme (such as gender studies).

In the spirit of celebration in this centennial year, our first three issues have made several gestures toward this history. Nevertheless, one of these gestures was occasioned by a circumstance we wish had not occurred. Our second issue of volume 54 is entirely devoted to a monograph entitled "The Nothing That Is": Representations of Nature in American Writing, written by our late colleague at the university and longtime editor of TSLL, Tony Hilfer. Tony died in an automobile accident about a month before his scheduled retirement, as he was driving to a dissertation defense; he left behind a virtually completed manuscript, the scope of which his working title seriously understates. The primary focus of this work is eco-criticism, and he discusses the role of negative spaces in depictions of the sublime in a variety of genres, from philosophy and poetry to short story and film. It is a significant final work by a distinguished Americanist, and we felt that the hundredth anniversary of the journal Tony loved was an appropriate place for it.

Two other special issues of volume 54 also directly involved University of Texas English Department faculty, although as editors, not as contributors. These two issues arose in conjunction with programs organized under the auspices of the English Department's newly created Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS). The first, 54.1, "Literature and Religious Conflict in the English Renaissance," is edited by Wayne A. Rebhorn and Frank Whigham. Although most of the essays focus specifically on literature, several others, in keeping with the TILTS topic as well as with TSLL's historically broad construing of the term, speak of larger social, political, and philosophical issues pertaining to both religion and conflict. We were very pleased to make this first TILTS the subject of the first issue of the centennial year.

The other special issue, 54.3, takes the second key word in the TSLL title, "language," in an innovative and timely direction. Historically, the great majority of language essays in TSLL have been centered on how language functions within a literary context. "Linguistics and Literary Study: Computation and Convergence," edited by Matt Cohen and Lars Hinrichs, takes us into the realm of digital humanities and the uses of linguistic computational analysis with implications far beyond strictly literary applications. Again, this issue seemed especially appropriate for a journal looking to begin a new century of publication.

Now in this the final issue of volume 54, we are taking TSLL, at least on this one occasion, into radically new territory. Virtually all our hundred-year history has been devoted to English, American, and Anglophone literature and language. But 54.4 turns to a geographical space, Turkey, and to a literature, ranging from late Ottoman to contemporary Turkish letters, that is not even in the English language. Five essays are included here that are critical assessments of modern Turkish literature and culture, touching importantly on the ways in which the experience of Turkey has shaped the imaginations of English-language writers such as that impresario of avant-garde politics, Edouard Roditi, and that apparently dyed in-the-wool, Midwestern-cum-Idahoan-cum-Floridian, American writer Ernest Hemingway. Two essays are about important Turkish writers who have been mostly well served by English translations: the first, Nobel...