Editor's Introduction

In recent weeks, there has been a survey floating around social media that delineates three periods of "Baby Boomer": Early or "Classic" Boomers; Late Boomers, also known as "Boomer Reboots"; and "Boomer Tweens" (this last group seems to be a new configuration). The survey began as part of a New York Times column, "I May Be 50, but Don't Call Me a Boomer," by Richard Pérez-Peñajan. One's place on the Boomer continuum is determined by one's answers to questions about such matters as popular culture, the arts, science, and politics. In his piece, Pérez-Peñajan surveys the vast differences between the Classic Boomers, whose childhood spanned the decades of the 1940s and 50s, and the Reboots, children of the 1960s and 70s. His conclusion: "There is no baby boom generation." And, he continues, "Oh, sure, there was a baby boom: a neatly defined, pig-in-the-python bulge from 1946 to 1964. But the kind of broadly shared cultural experiences that could bind together people across that whole span? That just didn't happen."

Reviewing the Table of Contents for Volume 76, Number 1 of The CEA Critic reminded me of Pérez-Peñajan's column. Since arriving at the University of Northern Colorado under the stewardship of the new editors, the journal has undergone a few changes. Longtime subscribers by now will have noted the use of cover artwork as well as the publication of an annual proceedings issue featuring the best of the CEA Conference. One aspect of The CEA Critic that we have vowed to maintain is replicating in our pages the diversity characterizing the organization's membership. CEA members hail from institutions small and large, four-year and two. They represent "Tier One" universities and "directionals" (such as our very own Northern Colorado). Members work in the fields of literature and composition, creative writing and technical communication, film and pedagogy. They are tenured and non; they are full-time and part. Some are preparing to enter the profession while others have left the classroom but not their CEA colleagues. Some of us are Boomers—Classics, Reboots, or Tweens. Some are Generation X. Increasingly, our members are Millenials (a.k.a. Generation Y). And on the horizon are members from Generation Z. Indeed, since its inception in 1938 (the journal would follow a year later)—the decade before the first baby boomers were born—the CEA has succeeded in binding together a diverse membership through a shared experience of language and literature.

The diversity of the CEA itself and The CEA Critic is reflected in the pages of this "general topics" issue. As editors, we are the proverbial kids in a candy store. We might self-identify as Americanists or Romanticists or New Historicists or Rhetoricians, but, at heart, we are all English geeks who read across genres and periods. Our most important requirements for contributions are solid argument and engaging prose, and the essays collected in this issue offer both. For example, Joshua Grasso's "'To Draw The Naked': Paintings of Female Character in Pope's An Epistle to a Lady and Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters" considers the competing visions of women offered by two important voices of the Eighteenth Century. Grasso examines Lady Mary Wortly Montagu's challenge to the "guidelines" of her male contemporaries, in particular Alexander Pope, through her Letters. As Grasso explains, Pope simply "sidesteps the question of who a woman is in her 'private life'" because a woman's life was never quite private at all. Where, Grasso asks, could a woman "see herself without becoming a museum piece?" For Lady Montagu, travel to the East, where she finds entrance to female-only spaces, offered the opportunity for a more accurate portrayal of women.

One hundred years later and half a world away, American author Elizabeth Stoddard was asking similar questions about perceptions of women. In her essay, "'A Woman of Genius is but a Heavenly Lunatic': Stoddard's Subversive Use of Music in The Morgesons," Doris Davis examines how Stoddard uses "female musical performance, composition, or genius" to understand both...