Two Publications in One Day: Law & Lit and JTR

The hard thing about slowness in academic publishing is that I've had 7-8 articles "in process" for at least two years, more in some cases, which can be spiritually trying.

The plus side? Sometimes, you get a bonanza of riches, or two publications in one day!
For the first article, it's entitled "The Image of Law in Stephen R. Donaldson's 'Reave the Just': Agency, Blame, and Sexual Assault," and it comes from the journal Law & Literature. I wrote about the publication misadventures of this piece a few weeks ago. Basically, it's about the strengths and weakness of the liberal position on rape law. From what I gather, it'll appear in the print version shortly -- Taylor & Francis (the publisher) seems geared to the sciences model of publication, in which immediate publication is important for impact factor. 

The second article comes courtesy of The Journal of Tolkien Research. This one has the snazzy title of "On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward a Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism." In short, it defends a Straussian approach to literary studies and explains why certain models of critical theory are poor vehicles for studying Tolkien and genre fantasy. Perhaps more than any of my other publications, this one makes me feel a little more "naked" . . . rather than just a cool idea, it's the intellectual basis for my entire approach to literature. It'll be the foundation of my monograph, too, although this piece isn't a prospective chapter -- it's just the intellectual groundwork behind the monograph.

This article, too, has a fun publication history. After I was invited to a roundtable discussion at the IMC in Leeds for 2019, I wrote a 10-page conference paper for the corresponding panel, plus an 4-page spiel as my intro for the roundtable. Later that July, after a modest 2-weeks of revision, I lumped both pieces together and sent it off to JTR. It came back revise-and-submit . . . but the fall was a brutal time for me, so I didn't get a chance to make the deep revisions the article required. That took 5 weeks when I finally got around to it, but now I'm extremely happy with how the piece turned out. 

And I would never, I admit, have thought about writing an article about methodology in Tolkien Studies if Dr. Fimi hadn't kindly invited me to that initial roundtable, so she's owed a great debt of thanks.

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