AWEJ Special Issue on Literature No.1, 2013 Pp.3-4
Foreword
The Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) is a nonprofit, refereed, double-blind, peer-reviewed, and open-access e-journal for scholars, researchers, teachers, and officials of the English language in the Arab world, and other countries across the globe. It is a pioneer quarterly journal that has published, over the past four years, eleven regular issues on linguistics and proficient language teaching of English and two special issues on translation with the aim of promoting English scholarship in the region.
Through the dedication and sincere efforts of a team of more than ninety selected and distinguished academic scholars from all around the world, AWEJ has achieved wide readership and conspicuous presence in the academia that can be measured out by its encompassing more than 21.000 members and contacts of professionals in the field, as recorded in its regularly updated database. These enlisted members are mainly scholars in English departments, language centers, research centers, Arab education ministries, higher education ministries, universities and colleges (public and private), English teachers’ associations, high schools and other educational institutions in the Middle East, North Africa, and other countries throughout the world. The journal’s success is also evident in its expansion into partnership with several international universities in organizing their annual conferences and publishing their special referred proceedings. No less significant is the journal’s launching of a project of publishing distinguished MA and PhD theses in the fields of its interest.
AWEJ’s editorial board, however, has lately received numerous requests for a special issue on literature in addition to its long term interest in linguistics, language teaching and translation. Encouraged by the journal’s achievement of national and international academic recognition and acclaim, the leading board has decided to undertake the task and reserve this fourteenth issue for the purpose. Focusing on forwarding the cause of authentic literary research, the issue was able to attract a variety of papers written by distinguished scholars. It comes out in its finished form as a unique edition that brings together contemporary interests of research oriented scholars in the field of literature in addition to offering a platform for aspiring critics. The selection for the volume covers a wide range of topics between well established and canonized authors in the fields of English and American literature to newly discovered voices in the areas of colonial literature and world literature in English. The tools of analysis employed in the selected articles also vary between traditional methods of formalist, biographical, psychological and historical readings of literature to contemporary postmodern, postcolonial, new historicist, and feminist critical orientations. Besides such depth, variety and wide spectrum in the field of literature, the issue incorporates papers on literary contents in English textbooks, the future of the departments of English in the region and the use of literary language in translation. Such incorporation brings together literature, translation and education. In its special issue the journal maintains links with pertinent sides of its long term publication objectives.
Since AWEJ has been recognized, indexed and listed with high ranked universities, research centers, databases, libraries and educational associations around the world, this issue hopes to maintain the same wide range of readership in literature as well. Many universities’ databases which are known for their credibility have chosen most of AWEJ’s papers of previous issues and have downloaded them for international readers in the fields. The editorial board equally aspires to have the selection of this volume meet with the same acclaim and reach literature oriented readers in all Arab countries and beyond. It also hopes that participants in the current issue will also enjoy similar academic limelight visibility by being quoted in potential citations as did their precedents in linguistics, language teaching and translation.
We all endorse this special issue of AWEJ and anticipate positive reception to its content that would encourage similar ventures on regular basis in the future.
Prof. Dr. Ebtisam Sadiq
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.