IT is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those academic disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it.
Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. Here, among large numbers of students at all levels of education, the erosion of the assumptions and presuppositions that support the literary disciplines in their conventional form has proved fundamental. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation.
New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.
Some important areas of interest will obviously be those in which an initial impetus seems to come from linguistics. As its title suggests, one aspect of New Accents will be firmly located in contemporary approaches to language, and a central concern of the series will be to examine the extent to which relevant branches of linguistic studies can illuminate specific literary areas. The volumes with this particular interest will nevertheless presume no prior technical knowledge on the part of their readers, and will aim to expound the linguistics appropriate to the matter in hand, rather than to embark on general theoretical matters.
Modern linguistics has also provided a basis for the study of the totality of human communication, and so ultimately for an analysis of the human role in the world at large. It seems appropriate, therefore, that the series should also concern itself with those wider anthropological and sociological areas of investigation which, deriving from the linguistic model, ultimately involve scrutiny of the nature of art itself and of its relation to our whole way of life.
This in turn will require attention to be focused on some of those activities which in our society have hitherto been excluded from the prestigious realms of Culture. The disturbing realignment of values which this involves, and the disconcerting nature of the pressures that work to bring it about both constitute areas that New Accents will seek to explore.
Each volume in the series will attempt an objective exposition of significant developments in its field up to the present as well as an account of its author's own views of the matter. Each will culminate in an informative bibliography as a guide to further study. And while each will be primarily concerned with matters relevant to its own specific interests, we can hope that a kind of conversation will be heard to develop between them: one whose accents may perhaps suggest the distinctive discourse of the future.
TERENCE HAWKES