The Editor's Fence

IV THE EDITOR'S FEMCE 1. The Conference for 19Sl: Originally scheduled for Cincinnati, the 1961 MLA meetings wi11 be held in Chicago instead. The Conference on English Fiction in Transition will meet for the fifth consecutive year. Date, time, and place will be announced in the next number of EFT, which is scheduled for late November or early December. Subject: THE ARTIST AS MERO: 1SCO-1920 Discussion Leader: Maurice Beebe (Purdue University) Requests for admission to the Conference should be addressed to Professor 3eebe, English Department, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Admission will be granted in the order requests are received up to the limit set by MLA. As previously, papers to be discussed will be published in an issue of EFT to be mailed prior to the meeting. The subject for discussion can no doubt be defined in many ways. We would like to keep the definition sufficiently broad and flexible to make possible discussion of books as different as Joyce's STEPHEN HERO, Gissing's RYECROFT, Moore's HAIL AMD FAREVJELL and CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, Gissing's NEV/ GRU3 STREET, novels in which the hero is, strictly speaking, an artist, novels in which the hero is the author, pseudo-autobiographical works which are not precisely novels, and so on. VJe are still considering papers suitable for presentation. 2. English Institute: Meeting at Columbia University from 5 to 8 September, the English Institute has at least one series of papers scheduled which will interest readers of EFT. The general topic "Victorian Criticism" will be illustrated by four papers: "The Victorian Sensibility" (William A. Madden), "John Ruskin" (Gabriele Bernhard), "Arnold's Humanism: Poetry As a Criticism of Life" (Wayne Shumaker), "George Saîntsbury" (René l/ellek). Other general topics on the program include "The Prevalence of Walt Whitman," "Travel Literature," and "Literature and the Visual Arts." 3. Reviews: We are allowing more space in some numbers of EFT for reviews. We welcome contri bat ions of this kind, although reviewers should query first so that there will be no duplication of effort and to ascertain that the book to be-reviewed is appropriate for a particular number of EFT. 4. Contributions: We welcome contributions of all kinds. We would be happy to see bibliographies of author's works, annotated bibliographies of writings about authors on whom we have not published a bibliography in depth, short notes, longer articles (we have no particular maximum number of words), unpublished documents with notes, and so on. We like annotations to be more rather than less detailed than what we actually will publish, for we prefer to have some leeway in cutting rather than padding. Above all, we insist that bibliographical data must be complete and accurate. We do not want explicatory tid-bits; we do not want appreciative gushing. We do want analyses of works which have not already been analyzed to death, we do want studies of variant texts, we do want scholarly studies based on examination of manuscript material, we do want carefully documented source and influence studies. We do not worry very much about most of the fallacies modern criticism has popularized. We worry a great deal about getting a few fundamental facts straight, like texts, dates of composition and publication, illustrative quotations J_n contejct, and so on. 5· Subscription Renewals; We shall be pleased to accept subscription renewals between now and the early months of 1352. Our first reminders will go out with this number; the second reminder wi11 be mailed with the next number of this year; and the last reminder will be mailed with the first number of EFT to be published in 1So20 Again subscriptions for 1362 will be one dollar; single copies and all back numbers (including those published in 1961) wi11 be fifty cents for each item, We shall once more follow our usual policy of mailing the first number of Volume 5 (1962) to all subscribers whose subscriptions have lapsed; thereafter we cannot continue a subscription unless it is renewed. Many of our subscribers have paid for subscript ions for one to three years in advance—we appreciate this, for it saves us much time and it helps us keep...