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I AM OFTEN TOLD that senior members of the profession do not send their essays to PMLA. They have stopped doing so, according to a recurrent view, because the journal only publishes trendy articles that have a radical political agenda shaped by foreign theories. Scholarly or formal studies, I hear, have little chance of acceptance, for marginal work has not simply been given a rightful place in the journal but has drowned out all other voices. A metonymic proof presented for these assertions is that most of the articles published in PMLA are written by young scholars, notably assistant professors. (And yet, if anyone should be "blamed" for this development, it is those who determine which manuscripts are accepted-the consultant readers and the members of the Advisory Committee and the Editorial Board-but they are almost exclusively full professors.) More often than not, colleagues who claim that PMLA does not receive or publish essays by well-known senior professors point the finger at the journal's authoranonymous reviewing policy, the lengthy evaluation process, and the slim chance of acceptance.1
I have reflexively expressed skepticism or disbelief whenever this narrative is repeated in various fragmentary guises. For in my experience, those involved in PMLA's refereeing process strive to ensure that the journal is indeed open "to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives," as the statement of editorial policy prescribes, and systematically look for signs of possibly biased readings. Determined, then, to test the accuracy of this recurrent narrative, I turned to the data banks at 10 Astor Place, or, rather, to the dexterous Ariadne of that labyrinth. I am grateful to Bettina Huber, the MLA's director of research, for organizing the relevant data to reveal submission and acceptance trends and discussing the results with me. What follows is a different narrative about PMLA contributors' ranks and the role that author-anonymous reviewing has (not) played.
In an effort to highlight trends as clearly and informatively as possible, we divided the period 1973-92 into five groups of four years each and considered the ranks of professor, associate professor, assistant professor, and graduate student.2 Overall, as figure 1 indicates, the number of submissions to PMLA has been declining since 1977, after increasing sharply between 1973 and 1976; in 1985, 1986, 1991, and...