Redux

Abstract

How much time has passed since the publication of VLC's Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (with the length of five long summers), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide-in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship-the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies-can make five years seem like no time at all (five summers that flew by, as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).