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Volume 10, 2008

  
   Volume 5, December 2004

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Editors’ Introduction

Ten Years After: Celebrating ABC 10

 

As with many emerging publications, ABC started out as a project animated by the desire to provide a forum for young scholars of English studies making their debut in the Academia. But whereas the manifest objective was to permeate a conservative caste-stratified Romanian HE milieu, the ‘sponsoring thought’, i.e. the thought behind the thought motivating the ABC project, was of a more ambitious nature. It was to do with fixing the foundations of an integrated mode of exploring Anglophone identity, one informed by a breadth of view characteristic of the encyclopaedic propensities inherent in Romanian scholarship. Nourished by the will to forge a ‘disinterested’, transcultural consciousness of Anglophone studies, the desideratum illustrates in retrospect a constructive albeit naïve vision of Anglistics as the site of liaisons and congenial belief systems. And yet, while contrasting sharply with the atomistic specialism at work in today’s arena, this cultural logic, the catalyst, indeed the bottom-line motivator of ‘juvenile’ ABC, taps into the principles of trans-disciplinarity informing academic practice. And whereas the pursuit of a unified sensibility will have struck a discordant note in the late 1990’s, with studies still distinctly ‘American’, ‘British’ and ‘Canadian’, in the current scene, with demarcations between subject areas growing both ever narrower and looser at one and the same time, the idea of an ‘expanded consciousness’ of the body of writings, knowledges, and idioms constitutive of global English is the logical development one takes for granted. With the benefit of hindsight, the sort of ‘generalism’ and far reach typifying the mode in which the publication approached ‘the great and the good’ of Anglistic heritage appears somewhat avant la lettre.

          Ten years on, looking back on the ABCs of ABC, the overarching impression is that the journal has from its very inaugural issue sought to capture areas of newness without being ‘trendy’, focusing on the relatively under-researched of Anglophone Studies, without slipping into ‘marginalism’, taking stock of the changing humanities as it moved from a dominant ‘native speakerist/ culturalist’ attitude to one of internationalism. And as it pondered pre-millennial and post-millennial English Studies and its ‘foreign relations’, it strove to incorporate new writing forms and media, tune in with work done in webinars and webzines, on webarts and online conference forums and, in the process, turn intercontinental.

          As we reminisce on a decade of ABC experience, we are pleased to welcome here new members to the ABC editorial board, salute our regular contributors in a cordial “thank you” for their continuing inspiration, indeed for the invaluable professional capital they invested in the undertaking, which has over the years made for a veritable boost of confidence.

The Editors

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