Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years of Neophilologus

This volume brings together a selection of pivotal articles published in the hundred years since the launch of the journal Neophilologus. Each article is accompanied by an up-to-date commentary written by former and current editors of the journal. The commentaries position the articles within the history of the journal in particular and within the field of Modern Language Studies in general. As such, this book not only outlines the history of a scholarly journal, but also the history of an entire field.

Over the course of its first one hundred years, 1916 to 2016, Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature has developed from a modest quarterly set up by a group of young and ambitious Dutch professors as a platform for their own publications to one of the leading international journals in Modern Language Studies. Although Neophilologus has remained broad in scope, multilingual and multidisciplinary, it has witnessed dramatic changes in its long-standing history: paradigm shifts, the rise and fall of literary theories, methods and sub-disciplines, as has the field of Modern Language Studies itself.



Rolf H. Bremmer Jr is professor emeritus of both English Philology and Frisian Language and Literature at Leiden University. His research focuses on Old English and Old Frisian about which he has authored as well as co-edited a number of books and numerous articles. He has been editor-in-chief of Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature since 2012.

Thijs Porck is a lecturer in Old and Middle English language and literature at Leiden University and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the cultural conceptualisation of old age in Anglo-Saxon England. He has published articles on Beowulf, medieval historiography, Old English and J.R.R. Tolkien. He has served Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature as its managing editor since 2011.

Frans Ruiter is Managing Director of the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. He is co-editor of Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature. He wrote a book about the relation between 19th-20th century Dutch literature and modernity, and published several articles and chapters on postmodernism.

Usha Wilbers is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. She wrote her dissertation on the American literary magazine The Paris Review<. She is co-editor of Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature and co-founder of ESPRit. European Society for Periodical Research. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twenty-first-century British literary criticism and European periodical studies.