Preparatory to a Retrospective Arrangement …

From its inception, the James Joyce Quarterly has benefited from youth. Tom Staley was still in his twenties when he founded the JJQ in 1963, “in the hubris of youth,” as he has often said. I was in my early thirties when I was asked by the University in 1989 to become the journal’s second editor, in the wake of Tom’s departure to direct the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Texas. Sean Latham was probably not yet thirty when he assumed the editorship of the JJQ in 2001, after my departure for the law. Youth is impetuous and all the other things said of it by those whom it has passed by, but the JJQ has always flourished under that sort of impetuosity. All three of us grew older and (we hope) wiser in our role as editor, but the mark of youth always remained, built into the journal’s DNA. None of us took up the editorship as a fully established scholar. There was probably a bit of risk with each of us, at the start anyway. I’d like to think that we passed the unspoken test.

Youth seeks its own, and one of my first acts as editor was to invite fifteen scholars to be new advisory editors of the JJQ. (We had only four resignations by incumbents—two of them curtly polite, two roundly abusive, testimony more to solidarity with Tom than to disapproval of me, whom the resignees scarcely knew.) Each of the new advisors had already made a mark in Joyce studies, but many were still in the early phase of their careers. This infusion of talent helped me with my goal of opening the JJQ to the range of applied theory that then dominated academic approaches to literature. I wasn’t sure how a single author would weather the flood of rereading, but Joyce held his own, not only taking on the coloration of new theory but often recasting theory in his own image. We had many special issues and guest editors, a joyous procession: Joyce and Lacan, Joyce and Homosexuality, Joyce and Advertising, Joyce and History, Joyce and the Archives, Joyce and the Law, and others besides. The JJQ has always been a single-author journal with an anti-cyclopean soul.

The essays from my era that are sampled in the present issue highlight the theoretical turn I’ve mentioned. I won’t try to add any new glosses atop my original reasons for publishing these pieces. I gave my reasons once upon a time, and the contexts I articulated then can be revisited in situ by consulting my introductions in the appropriate issues.

Bear in mind, though, that we weren’t doing theory exclusively. We maintained an emphasis, ever crucial to Joyce studies, on close reading. I had always been thrilled by the fireworks that Hugh Kenner, Margot Norris, Bernie Benstock, and Fritz Senn could kindle in the details of the Joycean text, and I wanted the many-colored brooms of that meticulous housekeeping to keep busy alongside the redecorating efforts of theorists. I also wanted to maintain an archival emphasis, which was and remains a significant part of my own scholarship. I refused to cede that dimension to Tom’s Joyce Studies Annual, which in turn refused to cede close reading to the JJQ—a mutual stubbornness that benefited both publications. Two of my favorite JJQ issues are “Out of the Archives,” Vol. 32, No. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1995), and the excavatory tribute to Vladimir Dixon, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Spring 1992). Those issues took me into the attics and archives of two friends, Omar Pound and John Dixon, both gone now. The covers of those numbers alone were worth the price of subscription. Looking at them again after a lapse of years still excites me. Covers became a passion of mine during my years as editor. Affaire de cuisine? Perhaps.

Two controversies loomed large during the years of my editorship: the Joyce Wars and copyright. In the early 1990s, the Gabler-Kidd melodrama was entering its final act, Kidd having forced a...