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On the Cover is Ary Scheffer's La Tentation du Christ (1854), housed at the Musée de Louvre, Paris. On the back cover is Arie Johannes Lamme's Ary Scheffer au travail dans le grand atelier de sa maison de la rue Chaptal a Paris (1851), housed at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, the site of Ary Scheffer's former home in the IXe arrondissement.

Changes at VS: This winter we have also had the privilege of working with two excellent undergraduate interns.

Aidan Crane hopes to graduate in May 2013 with degrees in both English Literature and Gender Studies. He is currently planning an Honors Thesis in the Gender Studies department analyzing the feminist imagination and its relation to science-fiction. He would like to thank Beth, Matt, Brian, and Jeanette for their support and encouragement.

Elizabeth Jones is a graduating senior with a double major in English and Japanese. She is grateful to the VS staff for giving her the opportunity to continue her English education while she scrambles for last minute credits for a Religious Studies minor. She is also thankful for all of the valuable experience in editing and proofreading she has received working with the staff, and currently still hopes to pursue a career in publishing.

As always, Victorian Studies thanks the Indiana University Honors College, without whose generous support our internship program would not be possible.

The Ends of History, a Special Issue of Victorian Studies:

In the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics and historians occupied a relatively integrated conceptual space through the rise of cultural studies and the "new historicism." If this interdisciplinary framework was never seamless, "historicization" nonetheless represented a critical project equally palpable to history and literary criticism. The last decade or so, however, has found many critics seeking the revival of form as a key axis for literary study as against a perceived overemphasis on (or reduction to) historical context or ideological content. An early catalyst, MLQ's 2000 special issue on the topic found Susan Wolfson attempting to "rehabilitate formalist criticism" without simply "cross-dressing it as a version of historicist criticism." More recently, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's 2010 special issue in Representations questioned the Jamesonian "political unconscious" while opposing the reading of "surfaces" to that of "symptoms," thus inviting a rigorous rethinking of the mandate to "always historicize." In a more polemical vein, Rita Felski's essay "After Suspicion" and her lecture "Context Stinks!" appear to equate historicism with suspicious reading and to find both irreconcilable with the need to "respect . . . what is in plain view." Still other critics urge "distant reading": methods like Franco Moretti's turn to graphs, maps, trees, and (more recently) network theory; or Heather Love's Latour-inspired "descriptive turn." Latour's critiques of "suspicious" reading and "context" have exercised enormous influence across the fields of social-scientific and historical studies (for example, Tim Mitchell, Rule of Experts, and Tom Bender and Igancio Farias, eds., Urban Assemblages). This "descriptive turn" has its own advocates in the historical social sciences, which may also provoke questions about what kind of historical analysis befits the formalist exploration of texts (literary and otherwise) and vice versa.

While defenders of suspicion have already come forward (for example, John Kucich, "Unfinished"), this special issue invites essays that take a somewhat different tack. Rather than positions for or against neoformalist, "surface," and "descriptive" critical practices, the essays we seek will ask what these discussions portend for Victorianist historicism. We ask: Need the turn toward form be a turn away from history and, if so, what does it mean to pursue "Victorian" studies ahistorically or posthistorically? What is the legacy of the "new historicism" and is it incompatible with "what is in plain view"? Do historical writings embed their own hermeneutic instructions independently of critics' distinctions between depth and surface, close and distant reading? What does history tell us about formalism and what does form tell us about history and historicism? In what new relation to each other are literary studies and history to stand in the...