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Desire crosses disciplinary and theoretical boundaries.
We believed that desire would be a useful theme for a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies . The editors' desire for interdisciplinarity has not, however, been fully realized. The conference's advertising and our own separate call for papers generated very interesting contributions, but their authors came overwhelmingly from English departments. As is often the case with frustrated desire, the desirer reconstructs the desired in a form more readily possessed. Although the authors of the essays in this issue come from within programs in English literature, their subjects and their approaches suggest how interdisciplinary, not to say un-disciplined, the academy has become.