The survival of literature in the age of globalization.

Rector, Monica ; Estrada, Oswaldo

With this special issue, Romance Notes celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. Founded in 1959 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for half a century our journal has published hundreds of articles on literary, cultural, and linguistic topics dealing with Romance studies. To commemorate our journal's long-standing history in the profession, this special issue addresses how we continue to study literature in a new globalized era, in sync with interdisciplinary perspectives, post-modern theories of gender and cultural studies, feminism and post-feminism, or post-colonial theories that reformulate imperialism, culture formation, identity conflicts, and coloniality at large.

Over the past fifty years, Romance Notes has published the work of rising and established scholars, including Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Manuel Duran, Elias Rivers, John Brushwood, Frederick de Armas, Enrique Pupo-Walker, Gerald Prince, Marvin D'Lugo, Stephen G. Nichols, and William Cloonan, along with countless others. In order to celebrate our journal's success, for this special issue we have invited scholars who are making significant contributions to the study of literature today. Thus, this volume includes articles and notes by Anne J. Cruz, Maria M. Carrion, Eugenia Paulicelli, K. David Jackson, David William Foster, Anibal Gonzalez, Julio Ortega, Maria A. Salgado, Sara Poot-Herrera, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Wilfrido H. Corral, and Mireille Rosello. We thank each and every one of them for their original contributions.

At the present time, our Department of Romance Languages maintains three internationally recognized publications. The oldest of these is the monograph series, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, founded in 1940 with Professor Sturgis E. Leavitt as its first editor-in-chief and now headed by Professor Frank Dominguez. Over the years it has published more than 250 titles. The second-oldest departmental publication is the journal Romance Notes, founded in 1959 by Professor U. T. Holmes, Jr., and now led by Professor Monica Rector. The third publication is the journal Hispanofila, founded by Professor Alva V. Ebersole and brought by him to the department in 1968. Professor Fred Clark is the current editor and Professor Juan Carlos Gonzalez-Espitia is the journal's associate editor. In addition, our department is home to Annali d'Italianistica, an Italian journal on monographic subjects brought to the Department by Professor Dino Cervigni in 1989.

What distinguishes Chapel Hill from other research institutions is that we are traditional with a modern twist. We are still committed to the study of literature and culture at the beginning of a new millennium, and we particularly welcome innovative studies that cross geographical, generic, and disciplinary boundaries.

We thank our editorial board for the preparation of this special issue, and particularly the work of professors Ellen R. Welch and Federico Luisetti.

MONICA RECTOR, EDITOR

OSWALDO ESTRADA, COORDINATOR