Preface

"To transmit is more important than to innovate."

—Eli Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters

Eli Wiesel's assertion, evidently intended not to be limited to Hasidism, may at times seem an overstatement, but it reminds us of the essential need to safeguard what we have inherited. The preservation of literary art depends on teachers and librarians, scholars and critics, editors and translators, adapters and archivists, publishers and booksellers, readers and students. The essays in this volume attempt to guide and assist us in responding to the fiction written and valued in a past era that is rapidly becoming ever more unfamiliar to us, but nevertheless offers enlightenment about enduring human concerns.

We are grateful to all of the writers who have submitted their work to us and also to the specialists who have reviewed these studies and provided detailed assessments helpful to the editors and our contributors alike.

We extend special thanks to Sarah Gates for preparing a perceptive, extremely comprehensive survey of Dickens-related materials published in 2015.

For important practical assistance, we thank the following administrators at CUNY's Graduate Center: Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Joy Connolly; Ph.D. Program in English Executive Officer Mario DiGangi; and Nancy Silverman, Assistant Program Officer, Ph.D. Program in English.

We are grateful to John O. Jordan and Renee A. Fox, Co-Directors of The Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Courtney Mahaney, Assistant Director of The Dickens Project; and Jon Michael Varese, the Project's Director of Digital Initiatives, for their cooperation. We especially appreciate Ms. Mahaney's placing on the Project's website the tables of contents for volumes 1–27 of DSA, as well as abstracts for subsequent volumes. (These items can be found on the Project's website: <http://dickens.ucsc.edu>. Look under "Resources" to find Dickens Studies Annual.)

We appreciate the reliable, skillful assistance of Jack Hopper, retired Editor-in-Chief at AMS Press; and the frequent help and encouragement from Albert Rolls, recently Editor-in-Chief at AMS Press. We also express our appreciation to the three doctoral students at the Graduate Center who have served at different times as our very capable editorial assistants for this volume: Julia Fuller for her assistance with the early work, Wei Wu for his contribution to most of the volume, and Christine Choi for her help with the final stage.

We wish to note, too, our deep gratitude to the late Gabriel Hornstein. As President of AMS Press, he was an enthusiastic, generous enabler of DSA for over thirty-six years. Even in difficult times for scholarly publishing in the humanities, he remained entirely consistent in his support. We dedicate this volume to his memory.

Following the loss of Mr. Hornstein, his family decided to close AMS Press. We have therefore reached a new publishing agreement with Penn State University Press, and we are grateful to its director, Patrick Alexander, for his consideration and assistance in arranging this transition. We also appreciate the warm welcome offered by Diana L. Pesek, Journals Manager at Penn State University Press, and the helpful guidance of Julie Lambert, Production Coordinator. Our next issue, Volume 49, will be published in two parts in 2018.

—The Editors