Preliminary Remarks

At the end of the 2024 volume, Ursula Lenker stepped down from the linguistic-medieval editorial team of ANGLIA. Despite this official farewell, we hope that her counsel will remain with us and thank her dearly for both her work and years of productive collaboration. As of issue 1 of the 2025 volume, Eva von Contzen has joined the medievalist editorial team of ANGLIA, whom we would like to introduce to our readers with her contribution to the present special issue.

Furthermore, we have taken this change in the Editorial Board as an opportunity for a realignment of ANGLIA. The first issue of ANGLIA: Journal of English Philology appeared on 1 January 1878. As the longest-running journal of English Studies, ANGLIA constitutes a unique record of the developments that have shaped English Studies for more than a century and a half. During this period, the discipline as a whole underwent a series of momentous changes. Given its origins in the nineteenth century, ANGLIA began as a philological publication with a strong emphasis on the history and development of the English language and on the manuscript sources without which the study of the subject would have been impossible. But from the very beginning, ANGLIA has also addressed other topics, i. e., the language, literatures, and cultures of an expanding English-speaking world. Thus, the journal witnessed the rise of modern literary studies in the inter-war period and, later on, that of modern linguistics. It opened its issues to Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Media Studies and to the vast space of literatures written in English in a postcolonial world. Throughout its long existence, ANGLIA has always succeeded in being both: a scholarly forum where cutting-edge innovation within English Studies was debated and an intellectual space where the histories of the English language and of English-speaking literatures and cultures were studied in dialogue with the field’s latest transformations in terms of theory, methodology and subject matter.

This is a tradition that ANGLIA’s editorial team has successfully upheld and further developed. Hence, ANGLIA has proudly published articles on English language and linguistics, on English literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on American literature and culture, on the New Literatures in English, as well as on General and Comparative Literary Studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory. At the same time, however, the editors of ANGLIA have become increasingly aware of the shifting tectonics of English Studies worldwide. While linguistics is still and will always be an important interlocutor of English Studies, it has, in effect, established itself as a discipline of its own, set apart from English Studies both in institutional and intellectual terms.

We have, therefore, decided to pursue a strategy of deliberately strengthening ANGLIA’s presence in the fields of Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. Nevertheless, this move does not represent an abandoning of the specifically historical perspective that has been ANGLIA’s trademark ever since it came into being primarily as a philological project. On the contrary, the journal aims to steer a course designed to facilitate increasing theoretical and methodological dialogue between different branches within the discipline and especially between historical perspectives in English Studies and scholarly outlooks shaped more decisively by present-day concerns.

In this spirit, we plan to engage more emphatically in conversations with neighbouring disciplines, as we seek to expand the journal’s interdisciplinary profile—all in the service of making the humanities heard in the current academic world and of securing a special space for English Studies therein.

January 2025

Andrew James Johnston, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein