Editor's Introduction

JML's Editor's Introductions, as I have fashioned them over the seventeen years of my editorship, have never simply announced the contents of a particular issue. I have seen them instead as an opportunity to speak both of the Journal's stable philosophy and practice in a rapidly, some would say disastrously, changing world of academic literary studies, as well as of my own philosophy as an editor and critic. Maurice Beebe created JML as a venue for old fashioned scholarly studies—"hard scholarship," he used to call it—centered around archival studies, literary history and biography, and especially the revelations, both scholarly and critical, that are made possible in the rich manuscript collections to which JML has always been linked. (The Directors of many of these collections have long been among our Advisory Editors.) I pledged from the start to continue Beebe's general philosophy; I agreed to succeed him in 1986, after his untimely death, only in order to keep JML from becoming a theoretical journal, as some of our colleagues then desired. I did so even knowing that this was a journal in which I myself was never very likely to publish very much.

As a literary critic and not a scholar—as someone interested primarily in what was on the page and not in how it got there—I understood from the moment that we interviewed Beebe and brought him to the English Department at Temple University that only rarely would my work be suitable for JML. True, Beebe had published my first major article while he was still at Modern Fiction Studies (a critical study of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, which I abstracted from my dissertation and for which I devised a scholarly frame—the correspondence between Durrell and Henry Miller—so as to suit it to the editor's clearly expressed needs). True also, I had provided the illustration for JML's very first cover and had edited the Journal's second Special Issue, on Nikos Kazantzakis, and had included in it my own first truly scholarly essay—on Kazantzakis' pivotal Cretan background—which subsequently served as the opening chapter of my book The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis (1980). Beebe had suggested the Special Issue, had vetted much of what I had done (although he wished that I had been a little less aggressive as an editor of text), and, in the best (that is, objective) New Critical fashion, never saw fit to name me on the title page as editor of the issue. (He was instrumental, however, in my getting tenure.)

I didn't know that I was a "New Critic"—I thought that I was simply a critic as opposed to a scholar (see Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision)—until after the New Criticism had been declared old and defunct. Characteristically, I have ever since declared myself an "unreconstructed New Critic." In much the same way, I didn't know that I was a student of a phenomenon named Modernism until after I had heard of its death (see Harry Levin's "What Was Modernism?"). Again, perhaps revealingly, I have ever since insisted on capitalizing the name and thus rejecting the minimalization that is implied by a minuscule first letter; this was (is), after all, the great age of the novel and (alongside Shakespearean England and Periclean Athens) the greatest of all literary periods, at least as I see it. I have managed, I trust, to adhere to my pledge to maintain the scholarly standards that Beebe had established. But I have also made changes in JML and have learned much in the process. The critic who edits a scholarly journal in a putatively theoretical age—as I once titled a talk—may occupy a unique position and may, perhaps, be able to perform a certain service to the profession.

I have frequently said in these Editor's Introductions that JML is not a reflection of my personal taste—except, of course, for my strong...