Introduction

Following three special proceedings issues coming out of its October 2014 “A matter of lifedeath” conference, Mosaic is pleased and proud to open 2016 with such a fine general issue as this one, an issue that reflects the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship that the journal endeavours to publish. For example, the issue broaches the conflation of “animal” and “woman” in traditional discourses on sexuality and sexual difference in several unexpected, instructive, and interdisciplinary ways: approaching Woolf’s Flush as a source text for feminist and animal studies; reading the Victorian novel as blurring the genres of pornography and animal-autobiography; and engaging Derrida’s work on “the animal” together with works of fiction. Philosophical dualism is contested in these pages, in one instance through the theorizing of contagion. And, as only one more example of many, the issue raises a question with which all interdisciplinary research must contend: how do writers and readers construct interpretive and (inter)disciplinary frames? With so much more to offer than I suggest here, this is an issue to read.

Not insignificantly, as Volume 49 No. 1, this Mosaic issue inaugurates the 49^th year of the journal’s publication, the year during which we will be planning for, and informing you of, special issues and events through which we wish to celebrate 2017, the journal’s 50^th anniversary, in large part by hosting and publishing exceptional work in interdisciplinary critical scholarship. For one thing, we will publish a special issue that gathers between two covers all of the “Crossings” interviews that Mosaic has featured over the past several years. As well, in one 2017 issue of Mosaic, the current Editor, who plans to step down in July 2017, will publish an essay-length reflection on academic journal editing, critical interdisciplinarity, and “futures” of the essay form. One 2017 issue of the journal will feature reflective and creative input from Mosaic staff and student interns: you should know, after all, just what kind of skill, talent, imagination—and hard work—is requisite to the publication of a journal such as Mosaic: four times a year, always on time, and up to the highest standards. A Mosaic symposium is in the planning stages, to be held at the University of Manitoba in 2017, possibly March, with additional details soon to follow. The current Mosaic cover anticipates our celebratory year, its two pink arrows moving across the image, and to the right, letters shown in movement, perhaps alluding to the future of letters, of scholarly publishing; with its stripes of white and overall, the cover suggests movement, forward from here.