Editors’ Note

In his preface to The Algerine Captive (1797), Royall Tyler laments the American predilection for foreign writing, which “excites a fondness for false splendor; and renders the homespun habits of her own country disgusting.” Tyler presents a straight-forward and perhaps predictable solution: Americans need to “write their own books,” and cultivate an appreciation for “homespun” customs, in order to shield themselves against foreign influence. Ironically, more than two-thirds of the novel that follows takes place amid the turbulent waters and foreign shores of the eighteenth-century circum-Atlantic world. Moreover, The Algerine Captive loosely mimics Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), underscoring the ways in which American fiction has always been in dialogue with extra-national traditions. Tyler’s preface is among the earliest post-Revolutionary attempts to define the parameters of American fiction, yet the ambiguities, tensions, and ironies lodged within his taxonomy are no less perplexing today. What do we talk about when we talk about American fiction? What do we mean by American? How do we define fiction?

As we have undertaken the work of relaunching Studies in American Fiction, these questions have been at the forefront of our conversations with each other, and with colleagues at conferences across the country. Since its founding in 1973 at Northeastern University, SAF has been the only scholarly journal devoted entirely to American fiction. While it would be easy to retrospectively imagine that these questions were unproblematic in the 1970s, and that the operant definitions of terms like “American” and “fiction” were more stable, to read across the wealth of work contained in the pages of the old volumes of SAF is to realize that these issues have energized Americanist scholarship for decades. We are proud to have inherited that mantle, and look forward to publishing essays that continue to reconsider and reorient our collective sense of what it means to study American fiction. We embrace an editorial mission aimed at publishing essays that define the terms “American” and “fiction” broadly, by interrogating and redrawing both generic and geographical boundaries. In so doing, we hope to build upon the strong foundations established by the previous editors of SAF and to extend this conversation into the twenty-first century. By striving to maintain the longstanding commitment of SAF to publishing exciting new work on writers ranging from Susanna Rowson to Toni Morrison, we also seek to consider forms of writing that do not conform to traditional canons, genres, and forms.

Every semester the rediscovery of these neglected texts pressures us to re-imagine and refine our syllabi, yet all too often the print conversations surrounding these texts lag well behind the attention paid to “new” works in our conference panels and classrooms. Studies in American Fiction seeks to address that unfortunate temporal lag by serving as a venue aimed at bringing timely attention to these emergent texts and conversations. In practical terms, this requires editorial practices that stress speed and efficiency while maintaining rigorous professional standards. We believe this emphasis is crucial if we wish to bridge the gap between public praxis and printed scholarship, and to extend the conversations we have in conference rooms—and with students in seminar rooms—so that they become more permanent and less ephemeral. In short, where possible, Studies in American Fiction will aim to make current Americanist scholarship available more quickly.

These endeavors will be aided by the innovative editorial structure of Studies in American Fiction: a New York-based collaboration between Fordham University and the CUNY Graduate Center. All too often, academic journals confront problems of continuity, succession, and geographical distance. All too often, rivalry rather than collaboration rules the day. In the present recession, academic publishing also confronts an atmosphere of dwindling resources. SAF seeks to counter these challenges with the rich resources afforded by collaboration and regional institutional networks. Beyond the diverse range of New York’s tri-state area colleges and universities, CUNY and Fordham are themselves comprised of twenty-eight separate campuses. The wealth of scholarly expertise in this regional network is noteworthy. It has become an all too familiar refrain of higher education pundits...