ELT History    
Robert Langenfeld  Editor & Publisher
     

June 2020

PURDUE UNIVERSITY, with its comfortable red brick and familiar Gothic spires, was a serene place in the 1940s. So was the American academy at large. Professors lived in their own class of genteel poverty. Change was already happening, however. A few rebellious sorts with intriguing names like Crowe Ransom and Penn Warren had begun to present renegade ideas on how to interpret literature, advancing something called New Criticism. It all seems like centuries ago from our perspective today.

A resistance of another kind to established views was forming at Purdue. Two members of the faculty—Hal Gerber and Maurice Beebe—were questioning conventional judgments about literary history. They were displeased with the historical divisions of literary study devised by the Modern Language Association. Their late-night discussions encouraged them to try and influence matters by editing new literary magazines. Beebe founded Modern Fiction Studies in 1955.

Gerber had an unusual idea for a journal. It was linked to his teaching of Victorian and modern British literature. He asked himself why were Thomas Hardy's novels taught in a nineteenth-century novel course, Hardy's poetry in a twentieth-century literature course? Don't the works of Conrad, Yeats, and Shaw, to mention a few, present similar dualities? "Apparently," Gerber said, "some writers have dared to bridge the centuries and defy the neat calendar division of literary periods in the MLA bibliography." What of those other writers: Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Grand, Arthur Symons, Olive Schreiner, George Moore? They were well known in their day. Little attention was given to them in the 1940s and 50s, even though the letters, notebooks, and autobiographies of figures such as Yeats were filled with conversation about them. The conventional wisdom ignored their influence on modern literature. Said Gerber:

    Indifference to a considerable quantity of what seemed to me important, if not always great, literature was rather superficially justified. Pater was a writer of purple prose who encouraged indiscriminate subjectivity. Wilde was a plagiarist, at best a dandy about literature, and saved from obscurity only by the sensationalism of his life. Moore was Zola's ricochet and at best wrote one commendable realistic novel and an amusing, gossipy but dated autobiography—and so on. 
British literature at the turn of the century was not just Yeats, Woolf, and Joyce. To separate these writers from their now lesser-known colleagues was to engineer literary studies in the name of what Gerber wryly called "modern critical practices." Literary historians should argue for a more encompassing context of study. From Gerber's viewpoint, the so-called "minor" writers at the turn of the century provided innovations in aesthetic theory and in the short story, poetry, and the novel. He also questioned the customary terms used to describe the period: late-Victorian, fin de siècle, and Edwardian. They didn't accurately characterize the literature from the end of the Victorian era to the end of World War I.

Gerber selected twenty-five people who had written dissertations on some aspect of the literature published between 1880 and 1920. He asked if they would be interested in petitioning MLA for a session on writers of this time. To his surprise the response was unanimous. The session that ensued in the fall of 1957 was attended by a small but enthusiastic group of scholars.

He wrote an article that reviewed the MLA discussion and solicited responses from those who had attended. He, his wife Helga, and several Purdue colleagues typed the text onto stencils, mimeographed, hand-collated, and then side-stapled a forty-three-page issue of what was called English Fiction in Transition.

The first issue went to about forty scholars. Word got around. The next issue was mailed to about 175 people. Interest continued to grow. Gerber had to charge $1 for volume 2, subscribed to by 400 individuals and institutions, some from overseas. By 1969 the journal was more accurately titled English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. Gerber considered "British Fiction in Transition" but deferred when someone quipped that a wag at the ready would call it BLT. It was printed in a new format, photo-offset, stitch bound, and distributed to 600 subscribers.

Gerber assembled an Advisory Board of scholars to peer review articles. He also nurtured a different kind of editorial philosophy. ELT declined university, government, and private foundation funding to ensure its independence. The editor's name was clearly printed beneath the masthead. He was responsible for the final decisions and the tenor of the journal. Scholars and their essays were given close attention; their submissions were not numbered and filed by some anonymous person. Gerber managed all the correspondence and day-to-day duties. Personal letters with evaluative comments by readers from the Advisory Board and the editor were included with rejected essays. Whenever possible, Gerber would try to guide an author through revisions if he thought that might produce a publishable article. I have continued all of these editorial practices.

Other things followed that first MLA session in 1957. Gerber organized nineteen more ELT Seminars at MLA. Eventually MLA created the Division of Late-Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century English Literature. He also started a special series of ELT issues to make available previously unpublished manuscripts; he helped prepare a three-volume series of period texts on the short story, drama, and poetry (published by Pegasus). He became general editor of a series of annotated bibliographies (published by Northern Illinois University Press) on Transition figures such as Pater, Gissing, Hardy, Conrad, and Galsworthy.

Hal Gerber died of a heart attack in April 1981. He was gone suddenly. The enthusiasm and loyalty he instilled in his graduate students was not. Helga Gerber wanted us to carry on with the journal, and so did Hal's colleagues. I became editor and have tried to remain faithful to his editorial vision.

But changes in ELT were to be expected. Some reflect the evolution in personal computers and the advances in print technology. For many years ELT was prepared with an electric typewriter for photo-offset printing: there were no page proofs and a predictably pedestrian look, and unfortunately too many typos. Since our funding was based on subscriptions the cost of the precious craft of the typesetter was always prohibitive.

In 1983 I purchased our first computer, an Osborne "portable"; it weighed 30 pounds and today would be an odd museum piece. I ran page proofs on a dot matrix printer and final copy was done with a daisy wheel printer. I had to tote the computer to one place or another on Arizona State University's campus to find an available printer since we could not afford one. The next substantial change came with the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter, fall 1985.

It is a cliché now but was not at that moment in the history of printing technology: "Roll over, Mr. Gutenberg." In March 1986 we produced our first "desktop published" issues using an IBM PC (which cost Arizona State University $5,000) with the now long-defunct word processing program WordStar. I could only print six or seven pages at a time; they had to be transferred through a special program to the LaserWriter. The tedium was worth it. Volume 29: 1 and 2 (1986) wouldn't win any awards in typography but at the time they seemed gorgeous.

Other things changed. The coverage in ELT broadened to include generous book review sections. The length of a volume went from 300 to 500+ pages. We began printing drawings and photographs of our 18801920 authors. I commissioned drawings from contemporary artists.

And then came the internet.

Our first website appeared in 1996 or 1997. I am not sure which. What an amusing artifact that would be to see now. Little did anyone in academic publishing know the extent of what was going to unfold. I used to take pride in saying ELT had approximately 900+ subscribers in forty countries—very respectable indeed. ELT has been online for more than a decade with Project MUSE, EBSCO's Periodicals for Public Libraries, and ProQuest. It has thousands and thousands of readers in research, college, community college, and public libraries.

I once called it the "New Audience." Now it is "The Audience."

Print journals are moribund. In 2020 we had less the 75 libraries worldwide subscribe to print. But still one of my favorite moments in the past relates to the printed edtion. It was when two issues arrived at the same time in the office from the printer, some 2,000 copies. The the powerful aroma of fresh ink and paper was a delight and remains a special memory.

Not a change but a new addition was the small press.

ELT Press was founded in 1988. Its 18801920 British Authors Series is an extension of ELT. Like the journal, then, ELT Press was created to fulfill a need for a community of scholars, and since then the series has 33 titles with a range of Transition authors.

In 2013 Professor Dillingham's Rudyard Kipling: Life, Love, and Art won a prestigious Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.

In 2015 we publised No. 29 in the 18801920 British Authors Series, Stanley Weintraub's Shaw Before His First Play: Embryo Playwright. It has received a number of very positive reviews. And in 2016 No. 32 in the series from the well-known Kipling scholar, Thomas Pinney, ed.: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to His Agents, A. P. Watt and Son, 1889–1899.

Another new phase in scholarly publication began in 2012 at Project MUSE, an impressive collection of university press e-books, continues. All books in the 1880-1920 British Authors series are available at MUSE.

§ § §

Hal Gerber edited ELT for twenty-four years. I became editor in 1983. I recently tried to count how many articles and book reviews I edited and published. It became tedious and rather foolish. I got to approximately 450 articles and 1,200 book reviews.

Volume 63: 1-4 (2020) completes my 37th year as editor. Time to stop.

In keeping with the founding editor’s wishes, the journal will stand on its continuous run since 1957 and cease publication. Hal Gerber said that all journals have an endpoint.

But ELT will continue to be available for readers to mine its 63 volumes of articles and book reviews through the three prominent online venues I mentioned. For details, see Journal.

Through these decades of publication ELT has served the academic community in an authoritative way, making a variety of scholarly views available in accessible, affordable formats as the print and online worlds evolved.

Many thanks to all the readers—world wide. Many thanks to all the authors and book reviewers. And especially many thanks to the members of the Advisory Board, past and present, who gave so generously of their learning and expertise.

19.4   1976

 

29.1   1986

 

50.1   2007

Editor's Fence:
A Golden Anniversary
50.1  2007

Kipling Cover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shaw Before His First Play

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kipling's Agents

 

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