First Published in 2002. Amongst a time of rapid and radical social change, New Accents is a positive response to change, with each volume seeking to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. All the essays collected here deal in their different ways with ''popular fictions'', but they were all, also, first published in the journal Literature and History. In that sense, then, they are quite literally ''essays in literature and history''.