Spring 2012

It is a pleasure to introduce the second volume of The Paper Shell Review, a literary journal conceived by University of Maryland undergraduates with the aim of showcasing the best of undergraduate scholarly and critical writing. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Dirda noted last year, an undergraduate journal devoted to such writing, and not to poetry and ficition, is somewhat unusual, especially because most undergraduates regard poetry and fiction as more creative forms of writing. But anyone reading the essays in this journal will see how artistic scholarly and critical writing can be. To write well about literature, you need to engage the words of authors creatively, and you need to be aware of just how challenging it is to offer fresh prerspectives on literary works that in many cases have long critical histories. The undergraduate authors in this volume are fully up to the challenge. 

The essays presented in The Paper Shell Review's second volume work with a range of critical approaches, and are united by their close attention to literary works themselves. Four of the essays are written by students from the mid-Atlantic (two by University of Maryland students and two by students up the road at The Johns Hopkins University), with the fifth essay demonstrating the journal's new global reach (the author is from the University of London). In terms of chronological sweep, we move from Shakespeare to Laura Esquival, or, to put this another way, from Claude Fretz's account of Shakespeare's subversion of genre to Toyin Ola's account of Esquival's subersion of the partiarchal history of magical realism. Gwen Kelbly shows how different readings of Hamlet emerge from the first two quartos, and she rejects the claim that one quarto version is better than another. For those who suspect that there's a fine line between criminals and defense lawyers, I recommend Emily Johnson's capacious study of the figure of the defense lawyer in eighteenth-century British fiction. Finally, Daniel Baldwin offers a new sympathetic reading of the often negatively-viewed Silla in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones. 

It is difficult to start up a literary journal, and it is even more difficult to sustain the effort after the excitment of producing the first volume. You need committed editors and exceptional writers, and The Paper Shell Review is fortunate to have both. Looking ahead to 2013, there are even greater challenges, for like everything else in the humanities these days, the journal may need new sources of funding (there are talks of budget cuts). I would encourage admiring readers to consider making a donation when the editors begin their work on the third volume. 

Robert S. Levine

Professor
Department of English, University of Maryland