These transformations demand that many traditional treat-
ments be rethought, and part of the new responsibility for
Crosscurrents will be to provide such studies.

Contributions to Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques/Third Se-
ries will be distinguished by their fresh approaches to estab-
lished topics and by their opening up of new territories for
discourse. When a single author is studied, we hope to present
the first book on his or her work or to explore a previously
untreated aspect based on new research. Writers who have
been critiqued well elsewhere will be studied in comparison
with lesser-known figures, sometimes from other cultures, in
an effort to broaden our base of understanding. Critical and
theoretical works by leading novelists, poets, and dramatists
will have a home in Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques/Third
Series, as will sampler-introductions to the best in new Amer-
icanist criticism written abroad.

The excitement of contemporary studies is that all of its
critical practitioners and most of their subjects are alive and
working at the same time. One work influences another, bring-
ing to the field a spirit of competition and cooperation that
reaches an intensity rarely found in other disciplines. Above
all, this third series of Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques will be
collegial -- a mutual interest in the present moment that can
be shared by writer, subject, and reader alike.

Jerome Klinkowitz

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