Announcement

We do not want merely a polite response to what we thought before, but by the freshness of thought in other minds to have new thought awakened in our own. We do not want stores of information only, but to be roused to digest these into knowledge.

F. [Margaret Fuller]. "A Short Essay on Critics." Dial 1.1 (1840): 5–11. Google Books.

The epigraph above prods us to remember the potential inherent in the genre of the review. The best reviews, as Margaret Fuller explains, display "freshness of thought" and can be a mode of "knowledge" production, not mere summary or evaluation. Guided by Fuller's vision, the editors of Legacy have been giving careful thought to the review section as the journal embarks on its second twenty-five years.

The value of the traditional review format that Legacy has used to date is undeniable. Short, single-book reviews have important uses for readers by providing an overview and evaluating the quality of new scholarship in the field, keeping readers current on recent publications, and guiding personal book purchases and library acquisitions. Legacy reviews have the added characteristics of being unusually cordial and encouraging of the work of scholars within our community. In addition, those who write reviews perform an important service to the profession and demonstrate their own authority in their fields of expertise. Yet the short form of these reviews can sometimes seem like a straitjacket, limiting the process of thought and knowledge production Fuller describes.

To address this concern, Legacy announces two new directions for its review section: 1) The word limit for traditional reviews will be slightly lengthened from seven hundred fifty to one thousand words, allowing for a more substantive measure of a book's importance to its field; 2) The journal will experiment with alternative review formats. These may, for example, take the form of longer review essays on multiple works clustering on a common topic, genre, period, or author (such as Karen Kilcup's engagement with anthologies of women's writing in Legacy 26.2, Jeffrey Steele's review of recent books about Margaret Fuller in 27.1, and Elizabeth Hewitt's review of letter collections in this issue). We may arrange for several scholars to review a single noteworthy book, bringing to the task their different areas of expertise and taking different emphases. Thus, in this issue, we feature three such reviews, written by scholars whose specific fields of emphasis—archival research, biography, the work of black women as editors and public speakers—intersected with Lois Brown's Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. We will continue to explore other creative formats, as well. Such a juxtapositioning of multiple books or perspectives can sometimes provoke startling new insights, or "new thought awakened," in Fuller's words. Our goal in experimenting with longer review essays in this way is to push the Legacy review section to truly contribute "freshness of thought" to the field.

Finally, the editors of Legacy face a new challenge that is actually a positive consequence of our readers' initiative and dedicated work over the past several decades in establishing American women's writing as an important field of inquiry: There are now more book publications on American women writers each year than we can fit in our pages. As a result, Legacy will feature reviews of books judged by its editors to be the most significant examples of scholarship in the field. Other works will be listed in the Bookshelf on the Legacy website, and in the future, as the journal develops its online initiatives, we will explore the possibility of publishing additional reviews online.