ANQ, a peer-reviewed journal, welcomes contributions of fact-oriented short articles and notes based on new research in the language and literature of the English-speaking world. Subjects in recent and upcoming issues range from gendered reading practices in the sixteenth century, to the reputation of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the eighteenth century, to recently discovered letters of John Steinbeck, to R. K. Narayan’s subversion of eco-theory.
           
Submission Details:

Submissions seldom exceed 3,500 words. Submissions that offer only explications de texte are not appropriate for the journal. Please see the Editor’s Note below for a description of recent changes in editorial policy and for a list of upcoming special topic issues.

Manuscripts must follow MLA style, including parenthetical citations in text, endnotes rather than footnotes (if required), and an alphabetized list of Works Cited, as described in the MLA Style Manual, 3rd ed. (2008) by Joseph Gibaldi.

The editors reserve the right to make editorial changes necessary for space requirements, readability, and journal standards.

Please send submissions as a Word document email attachment; address these and correspondence regarding editorial matters to:

heldref@taylorandfrancis.com

Editor’s Note

In the January 1988 issue, incoming editor Arthur Wrobel noted that ANQ had been founded by his predecessor, Lawrence S. Thompson, as a “medium of exchange for bibliographers, biographers, editors, lexicographers, and textual scholars.” Wrobel identified the direction that the journal would continue to take under his, and his successor Paul Acker’s, editorships: “From sources and analogues to the identification of allusions, from variant manuscript readings to previously neglected archives, from Old English word studies to OED supplements, from textual emendations to corrections of bibliographies and other scholarly references, ANQ will provide a needed outlet for short factual research concerning the language and literature of the English-speaking world.”

However, since 1988, the proliferation of electronic resources has silently challenged the journal’s mission. Electronic mailing lists, for example, allow members of a professional society to engage in a discussion of interpretive cruxes that is both far more immediate and oftentimes more internationally based than a print quarterly can occasion. And before even its first volume was published in 1995, the Indiana University Press John Donne Variorum had made provision for its print volumes to be available online where they may be regularly revised and updated, preempting the discussion in a journal like ANQ of emerging editorial matters. Other editorial projects will no doubt follow suit. ANQ’s commitment to factual research may seem unduly conservative to some members of the profession after courses in bibliography, textual editing, and research methods have been replaced on many campuses by courses emphasizing theoretical approaches to texts.

There will, however, always be a need for a forum for the textual, bibliographical, lexicographical, and biographical study which, historically, ANQ has provided, and ANQ remains committed to serving as an outlet for scholars doing this kind of work. Likewise, it will continue to welcome presentations of overlooked authors or forgotten works by major authors. And it will continue to emphasize factual over theoretical approaches. To reposition itself in current scholarship, however, ANQ will gradually incorporate two changes in operating procedure.

First, ANQ will no longer publish short (500–750 word) reviews of individual books, but will commission review essays (1500–2000 words) on a group of books on a specific topic, or on a major new publication that serves as the occasion to assess the current state of studies on a particular writer or genre.

Second, beginning in late 2009, the spring and fall issues will address specific topics and will alternate with general submission issues. Topics will be selected that can be served by ANQ’s format—that is, descriptions, or actual dissemination, of archival material; identification of allusions and specific instances of influence; and assessments of specific textual matters. The first five topics are:

UPCOMING SPECIAL TOPIC ISSUES

    * Spring 2010: Women Devotional Writers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
    * Fall 2010: James Baldwin and Influence
    * Spring 2011: Contemporary Irish Writers
    * Fall 2011: Reading Robert Herrick

Raymond-Jean Frontain
Executive Editor