New Literary History

• 1. Introduction

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  New Literary History arrived in 1969 when Ralph Cohen identified a gap in academic publishing. No English literary journal then existed for critical theory or for a serious reconsideration of literary history. Cohen was direct about what that absence meant: the field was avoiding questions about the nature of literature, history, and interpretation itself. His answer was a quarterly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. That journal would go on to earn six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. What drew continental European theorists to contribute to an American journal? And how did a publication founded at the University of Virginia eventually become the first English-language literary journal translated into Chinese?

• 2. Against the Critical Current

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  Ralph Cohen established New Literary History as part of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the University of Virginia in 1969. He described the journal as "a move against the critical current," and the phrase captured his intent precisely.

  The dominant mode of academic literary criticism at the time was New Criticism. It centered on close reading of individual texts and resisted broad theoretical inquiry. Cohen's journal set out to examine what that approach left behind: the theoretical bases of practical criticism itself. It also addressed the relation between past literary works and present critical needs.

  Hermeneutics, the reading process, and the relation between linguistics and literature were all within the journal's stated scope. Topics also included literary change, the definitions of literary periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Articles from scholars in other disciplines were invited as well, provided they addressed problems relevant to literary history or literary study.

  That cross-disciplinary openness would soon attract contributors working in a critical tradition far removed from Anglo-American academic norms.

• 3. The Continental Bridge

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  Wolfgang Iser described Ralph Cohen's editorial approach as raising questions "not in the orbit of the discipline when the journal was launched." Among those questions: What is literature? What is history? What is interpretation? What is criticism?

  By insisting on asking them, the journal brought into view the basic presuppositions that literary study had long taken for granted. As Iser put it, those presuppositions had to be "contextualized in order to trace the provenance of what has been posited in the theoretical approaches concerned." New Literary History helped introduce British and American scholars to methodologies from continental Europe. The journal was characterized by "an attempt to bring Anglo-American criticism into a close interrelationship with Continental approaches to literature and culture."

  That bridging ambition would eventually lead the journal to a translation project no comparable English-language literary publication had attempted.

• 4. Crossing into Chinese

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  In 1999, New Literary History became the first English-language literary journal to be translated into Chinese. Beginning in 2001, a selection of the journal's essays was translated and published annually by Tsinghua University Press in Beijing. For a publication founded to open Anglo-American scholarship to outside theoretical traditions, the Chinese partnership extended that mission into a new linguistic context.

  Ralph Cohen had led the journal from its founding through 2008, a tenure spanning nearly four decades. Rita Felski succeeded him as editor. Bruce Holsinger, the journal's current editor, holds his appointment at the University of Virginia, the same institution where Cohen had launched the journal. The annual Chinese edition at Tsinghua University Press means those founding questions now reach readers in Beijing each year.