Foreword

American Literary Scholarship, I am pleased to report, is alive and well and living online and on the shelves of teachers, researchers, and academic and public libraries around the world. While this 51st iteration of AmLS is not the landmark semicentennial edition of last year, it is still a prime number. As I wrote in the foreword to AmLS 2011, moreover, the caliber of our contributors has always been a measure of the vitality of the annual, and I am proud to welcome several authors new to the project: Patrick R. Query (U.S. Military Academy) succeeds Frances Dickey on “Eliot”; Deborah Clarke (Arizona State University) succeeds Peter Lurie on “Faulkner”; Theresa Strouth Gaul (Texas Christian University) succeeds Ed White on “Literature to 1800”; Jeff Westover (Boise State University) revives “Poetry: 1900 to the 1950s”; Jim Cocola (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) succeeds Frank J. Kearful on “Poetry: The 1950s to the Present”; Michaela Giesenkirchen Sawyer (Utah Valley University) revives the section “German Contributions”; and Deborah Cohn (Indiana University) revives the section “Spanish Contributions.” Joseph Fruscione (George Washington University) retires from “Fitzgerald and Hemingway” with our sincere gratitude for his contributions to the past five issues of the annual. Professor Fruscione will be succeeded by Michael Von Cannon (Louisiana State University), who this year collaborated with him on the chapter. A special note of thanks to Jerome Klinkowitz (Northern Iowa University), who contributes his chapter on contemporary fiction to the 35th consecutive issue of the annual. If literary scholars were baseball players, Professor Klinkowitz would be Cal Ripken.

To judge from the number of column inches of citations in the MLA Bibliography, the sheer mass of scholarship in the field of American literary studies has leveled off over the past decade under the pressure of declining library budgets, the contraction of humanities departments, and the disappearance of some publishing venues. But we also begin to review in AmLS 2013 articles that appeared in the first volume of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, the first major new journal in our field since Dreiser Studies morphed into Studies in American Naturalism in 2006. J19 fills a niche in the market left by the suspension of ATQ in 2008.

As usual, Professor David Nordloh and I appreciate the assistance and resources provided to us by Indiana University and the University of New Mexico. Thanks to Helen Slavin and the staff of MLA Bibliographic Information Services in making available a prepublication version of the 2013 MLA Bibliography. Special thanks to Jailyn Moreland, Charles Brower, and their colleagues at Duke University Press in supervising the production of this volume and saving me from all sorts of silly mistakes. Authors and publishers can assist us in assuring the comprehensiveness of AmLS coverage by directing offprints of articles, review copies of books, and publication notices to Professor Nordloh at 495 Lake Dornoch Drive, Pinehurst, NC 28374.