• Editor's Note"Language Problems" (with thanks to Kirsten Silva Gruesz)
• Marion Rust

Two months into my editorship of this journal, the review editors and I received a formal letter from Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, coeditors of an award-winning symposium titled "Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies," jointly published in Early American Literature and William & Mary Quarterly shortly before my tenure began. They wrote to describe challenges they had experienced during the copyediting process with EAL, particularly about whether to capitalize Native and Indigenous. "In NAIS," they explained, "capitalization of Native and Indigenous is used to distinguish a reference to the original peoples of colonized territories from more general usage, such as a plant being indigenous to a particular area or any person being a native of a particular city" (personal correspondence, 8 Apr. 2019, p. 1). Now that the matter had been resolved with respect to the symposium, they wanted to ensure that EAL updated its house style to standardize this practice going forward. Just as important, they hoped that EAL editors would "presume authorial expertise in these instances and query the author when encountering unfamiliar language rather than altering NAIS terms" (1). This approach would "signal that EAL is a welcoming and important venue for the publication of pre-1830 NAIS scholarship" (2). After consulting with our Coeditor for Reviews, Katy Chiles; our Interim Book Review Editor, Michelle Sizemore; and our copyeditor, Editorial Associate Christi Stanforth, EAL was able to implement this update without further ado. There began my education regarding one of the most fascinating aspects of the job I say goodbye to with this issue: house style.

Literary scholars may be particularly attuned to how a seemingly minute "language problem"—to borrow a phrase from Kirsten Silva Gruesz's new book on Cotton Mather and Kristina Bross's review of that book in this issue—does important work that extends from typographical consistency within a particular publication all the way to "restorative justice" [End Page 577] (Gruesz 228, quoted in Bross review this issue, 754–758). Consistently uppercasing certain words can counter linguistic dehumanization and, in the case of EAL, signal recognition that the journal itself is not the de facto expert. In this sense, the journal may be considered another respondent to its own content, continually shaped and reshaped by what its contributors have to say both in and outside its pages.

Readers may well be reminded by this discussion of another more heated dialogue around capitalization. When the New York Times belatedly agreed to capitalize the word Black in reference to people and cultures, antagonism was widespread (see the online comments section to Coleman). Advocacy for this practice throughout the journalistic and scholarly publishing domains, however, was already widespread by the time the Times and many other print sources adopted it, including through documents such as Gabrielle Foreman's community-sourced "Writing about Slavery? Teaching about Slavery? This Might Help" and Michael Ezra's 2015 "Editor's Note" to the second issue of the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. (Thanks to Katy Chiles for alerting me to these sources.) By the time EAL updated its style guide, there was really no question about the legitimacy of capitalizing Black. With particular reference to Foreman's invaluable guide, EAL also in short order standardized the use of the terms enslaved and enslaver to make clear that the condition of enslavement in no way subsumed personhood.

Inclusive style policies, however, are not always easy to implement, as witnessed by the inconsistent employment throughout recent issues of the journal of the more correct (by the above logic) enslavement narrative in place of what writers have long referred to as the genre of the "slave narrative." And there are no doubt many other irregularities and default settings within the journal's usage policies that inscribe forms of bias I have yet begun to appreciate. How better, for instance, to accommodate nonbinary, transgender, and other genderqueer historical figures? (For a recent assessment of the state of our field in this regard, see LaFleur.)

Even for a person as detail-oriented as myself—and let this stand as my apology to the...

• 编者注“语言问题”（感​​谢 Kirsten Silva Gruesz）
• 马里昂·鲁斯特

在我担任这本期刊的编辑两个月后，评论编辑和我收到了一封来自 Alyssa Mt. Pleasant、Caroline Wigginton 和 Kelly Wisecup 的正式来信，他们是题为“美洲原住民和土著研究中的材料和方法”的获奖研讨会的联合编辑，在我任职前不久， 《早期美国文学》和《威廉与玛丽季刊》联合发表。他们写信描述了在EAL 的文案编辑过程中遇到的挑战，特别是关于是否将Native和Indigenous大写的问题。“在 NAIS 中，”他们解释道，“Native 和 Indigenous 的大写是用来区分殖民领土的原住民和更一般的用法，例如某个特定地区的本土植物或某个特定地区的原住民。特定城市”（个人信件，2019 年 4 月 8 日，第 1 页）。既然研讨会的问题已经解决，他们希望确保EAL更新其内部风格，以规范今后的做法。同样重要的是，他们希望EAL编辑“在这些情况下假定作者具有专业知识，并在遇到不熟悉的语言时询问作者，而不是更改 NAIS 术语”(1)。这种方法将“表明EAL是发布 1830 年之前的 NAIS 奖学金的一个受欢迎且重要的场所”(2)。在咨询了我们的评论副编辑 Katy Chiles 后；我们的临时书评编辑 Michelle Sizemore；我们的文案编辑、EAL 编辑助理克里斯蒂·斯坦福斯 ( Christi Stanforth)毫不费力地实施了此更新。我开始接受关于这份工作中最令人着迷的方面之一的教育，我已经告别了这个问题：家居风格。

文学学者可能特别关注一个看似微不足道的“语言问题”——借用克尔斯滕·席尔瓦·格鲁兹（Kirsten Silva Gruesz）关于科顿·马瑟（Cotton Mather）的新书和克里斯蒂娜·布罗斯（Kristina Bross）在本期对该书的评论中的一句话——如何在一个范围内从印刷一致性延伸出重要的作用。特别出版物一直到“恢复性司法” [第 577 页结束]（Gruesz 228，引自 Bross 评论本期，754-758）。始终将某些单词大写可以对抗语言非人性化，并且就EAL而言，表明该期刊本身并不是事实上的专家。从这个意义上说，该期刊可以被认为是其内容的另一个回应者，它的内容不断地被其​​贡献者在其页面内外的言论所塑造和重塑。

这次讨论很可能会提醒读者关于大写的另一场更激烈的对话。当《纽约时报》迟来地同意将“黑人”这个词大写来指称人和文化时，敌对情绪就普遍存在（参见科尔曼的在线评论部分）。然而，当《泰晤士报》和许多其他印刷媒体采用这种做法时，整个新闻和学术出版领域对这种做法的倡导已经很普遍，包括通过诸如加布里埃尔·福尔曼（Gabrielle Foreman）社区来源的“撰写有关奴隶制？教导有关奴隶制？这个”等文件。可能会有所帮助”以及 Michael Ezra 2015 年《公民与人权杂志》第二期的“编者按” 。（感谢 Katy Chiles 提醒我注意这些来源。）当EAL更新其风格指南时，大写Black的合法性确实已经毫无疑问。特别参考福尔曼的宝贵指南，EAL还很快标准化了“被奴役”和“奴役者”这两个术语的使用，以明确奴役状况绝不包含人格。

然而，包容性风格政策并不总是容易实施，最近几期杂志中不一致地使用了更正确的（按照上述逻辑）奴役叙事来代替作家长期以来所说的“奴隶制”类型，这证明了包容性风格政策并不总是容易实施。 “奴隶叙事”。毫无疑问，该期刊的使用政策中还存在许多其他违规行为和默认设置，这些都包含了我尚未开始意识到的偏见。例如，如何更好地容纳非二元性别、跨性别者和其他性别酷儿历史人物？（有关我们领域在这方面的最新评估，请参阅 LaFleur。）

即使对于像我这样注重细节的人来说，这也是我对……的道歉。