Editorial: Box 1984 revisited

In the fall of 1967 the first issue of NOVEL: A FORUM oN ON FICTION appeared, featuring essays by Leslie Fiedler, Julian Moynahan, Carlos Baker, Bruce Morrissette, Samuel Hynes, Malcolm Bradbury, and Robert Alter. There was also an explanatory editorial, "On Box 1984" (our mailing address), announcing the journal's intention to serve as a clearinghouse for theories of the novel and for criticisms of novels in all ages and literatures. Our contributors were selected to those ends. Under the rubric of "Second Thoughts on Love and Death in the American Novel," for instance, Fiedler characterized his famous text as "My First Gothic Novel" and proceeded to indicate the mythic reaches of his narrative madness, his sustained discourse on the American novel's gothic attributes. In our second issue (Winter 1968), Wayne Booth would contribute to this "Second Thoughts Series" with "The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions." Similarly Malcolm Bradbury's contribution to still another series in the first issue, "Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Through Structure," would be followed in our second issue by David Lodge's contribution, "An Approach Through Language." On our tenth anniversary, moreover, NOVEL would publish in book form, under the rubric Towards a Poetics of Fiction, the texts of both series and of other strikingly worthy journal essays.

Our ambitious aim to deal with the novel in all ages and all literatures would be illustrated, in that first issue, by Robert Alter's essay on "Fielding and the Uses of Style," Bruce Morrissette on evolving narrative viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet, and in the review sections, by reviews of books on Cortazar's Hopscotch, Pinget's Quelqu'un, Lenz's Stadtgesprach, Strittmatter's Ole Bienkopp, and of books on early American and British fiction and fiction theory. Indeed, our aim was to provide for the novel the kind of critical, theoretical, and comparative attention the New Critics had applied to poetry, with the all-important proviso that novels by generic nature call for a wider variety of critical, comparative, and theoretical approaches. The journal begins, in effect, with this recognition of the need to apply more extrinsic forms of criticism to the novel than New Critical formalists had applied.

In that glorious first year I edited the first and third issues of NOVEL and Park Honan edited the second issue. Park and I were the journal's co-managing editors; Ed Bloom, the former department chairman, was the senior editor. By the next fall I had replaced Bloom's one-year replacement, Edwin Honig, as department chairman; Park had moved to the University of Birmingham in England; Bloom had then begun to help me with the editing; and Roger Henkle, a Honig appointment with experience in law and journalism, had taken over our third yearly issue. A protege of Ian Watt, Henkle would eventually replace me as managing editor and would begin to broaden the journal's critical range-until his sudden death at 55 in 1991.

I can remember the initial meeting in Fall 1966 of Bloom, Honan, and myself, the journals initial founders, with visitor David Lodge, Irish maven David Krause from our own department, Frank Durand, our first Book Review Editor, from the Spanish Department, and John Shroeder and George Monteiro from our American literature staff. We found places on the masthead for all who came, then gave ourselves a year to put out the first issue. We went next to Malcolm Grear for our cover and makeup design (still extant) and to Charles of the Ritz for our initial grant of $25,000 to begin publication. Bloom got us the money, Honan brought in his British friends Lodge, Bradbury, and Barbara Hardy as future contributors, and I provided the formula for the journal's overall mission. We also planned to share the editing equally, an issue per editor of our thrice yearly production; but with Park's early departure and Bloom's late start and eventual retirement, I've edited more issues than anybody-including this one in Fall 1997, my last official year as a retiring Brown employee, and perhaps as NOVEL's editor. I'll be replaced myself by managing editor Nancy Armstrong, who deserves all the credit for managing NovEL over the last four years.

Meanwhile the journal has more or less completed its initial mission as a clearinghouse for novel theory and critical practice within and beyond the formalist tradition. At our tenth anniversary conference we confidently confronted changing ways and were bemused by their challenge. By our twentieth anniversary conference, on "Why the Novel Matters," we could barely answer why. The urgencies of poststructural theories-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial-now dominated our attention. Within the last decade, moreover, we have moved well within the booming realm of cultural studies. We continue to take a leading role in furthering such novel studies. Over our thirty-years run, for instance, we have held four major conferences at Brown and have published two books with Indiana University Press. We have consistently attracted seminal essays from diverse hands. We have seen and continue to see essays from our pages reappear in other books and anthologies-the latest being Mary Ann Farrell's Telling Complexions on the blush in nineteenth-century British fiction, reviewed in this issue. Our function as a forum on fiction continues, then, in changing times.