AJVS, 27: 1 (2023) Special Issue on Water

Welcome to this new Special Issue on Water! I hope you will find a variety of worthwhile reading. There are four very diverse articles: Deborah Denenholz Morse on how the Atlantic figures in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers; Aiden Wakely-Mulroney on sailor figures in Wordsworth’s poetry; Janette Leaf on Netflix’s intriguing recent neo-Victorian series, 1899; Silvia Granata on Chinese-British relations as framed by the nineteenth-century history of sailing the Yangtze.

An innovation for this issue is the inclusion of creative works in the form of poetry. We welcomed contributions, drawing on literature, history and personal experience, from Alexandra Lewis, Shale Preston, Carolyn Oulton, Schuyler Becker and VJ René.

Our contributors hail from the US, the UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Among them are four reviewers: Richard Gehrmann, Robert Jenkins, Ryan Suckling and Jacqueline Kolditz. Check out their reviews!

As the journal’s Editor, I would like to thank the three Guest Editors for their invaluable input throughout the process, especially when I had to be away from my computer.  They are Helen Blythe, Alexandra Lewis and Lesa Scholl. Their lively Editorial Introduction contextualises the issue’s critical and creative contributions. I am grateful too to Alison Bedford for commissioning and coordinating the reviews, and to Mandy Treagus for her work on the creative submissions.

Joanne Wilkes

December 2023