ESQ: About Us

Mission Statement

The oldest professional journal devoted to nineteenth-century American literature, ESQ began by focusing on the American Renaissance’s traditional figures, and it continues to embrace scholarship that features Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Hawthorne. Over time the journal’s scope has expanded to cover American literature and culture of the long nineteenth century as well as to include a more diverse set of voices and texts.  The journal welcomes submissions that conceptualize alternative American renaissances; that focus on Southern, Western, or Midwestern literatures; or that explore one or more ethnic American literature.  Published quarterly, ESQ features familiar approaches, such as new historicism, reader response criticism, biographical criticism, borderlands studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies, and actively encourages submissions that draw from newer methodologies, including ecocriticism, disability studies, materialist feminism, mobility studies, and affect studies. The editors also seek proposals for special issues that address a coherent subject area or exemplify a particular theoretical approach. The journal regularly publishes scholarship by scholars at all stages of their careers, and the annual “Year-in-Conferences” feature is written collaboratively by graduate students. The journal welcomes submissions for its special features: “Findings,” which highlights a “lost” or forgotten text; “Resonances,” which considers how a nineteenth-century text reverberates today, “Provocations,” which proposes a new method or lens for reading US literature, and “Animating the Archives,” which models new ways of reading archival materials. Please write to the editors or read our submissions page for more information on submitting a special feature.