Introducing “Virtual Archives”

With this issue, Novel launches a new section titled “Virtual Archives.” Here we will publish short essays that update and explain the new or continued relevance of critical-theoretical works of scholarship essential to novel studies.Our first example takes the occasion of a recently published volume as an opportunity to capture the enduring value of Raymond Williams's writing for novel critics. The appearance of a new critical book is but one of the prompts we can imagine for a contributor to revisit the foundations of novel studies. We anticipate that our readers will not want for good reasons to delve into the archive and to explain how key texts in the study of the novel are important today.For this first iteration of “Virtual Archives,” Jonathan Arac joins Holly Yanacek, coeditor of the recently published Keywords for Today: A Twenty-First Century Vocabulary. This book collects roughly thousand-word-long unsigned entries, each of which develops a keyword. With this structure, the volume updates and revises Williams's Keywords while retaining its format. Given the impetus of this new publication, Arac and Yanacek's treatment of Williams necessarily dwells upon his Keywords but also ranges widely through his entire oeuvre, discovering along the way fresh inspiration for novel critics to read and reread this vital work. In their essay's second half, the authors provide a sustained demonstration of how attention to keywords can abet novel study. Here too is but one of the approaches others might take to show the relevance of classic novel scholarship

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