Introduction

Academic handbooks are strange beasts. (For one thing, of all book formats, they are about the least amenable to being picked up with one hand!) The arrival of The Handbook of Field X usually indicates that Field X has reached a certain level of maturity. The scholars of Field X take a break from empirical research to repackage their recent work, including theoretical ideas, into authoritative chapters. It’s a time for taking stock and seeing how Field X is progressing. Perhaps some trends that have been emerging in various corners of the literature, or the First International Conference on Field X, will become apparent in the new handbook, as related ideas finally come into close physical proximity to each other. Graduate students are assigned the handbook as mandatory course reading and generally discover that few things are more soporific than trying to read an entire volume of this type from cover to cover.