Partisan Review

Abstract

Partisan Review remained in principle and in practice a literary magazine, with fiction, poetry, and especially criticism comprising the majority of its pages, and yet it was all as a magazine of cultural criticism that Partisan Review exercised its sway upon American life. The chapter examines the inadequacies and elisions that left Partisan Review a fading light by the 1960s: its equivocal support for women writers, neglect of black writers, and its gradual retrenchment into a conservative institution, unable to condone the countercultural rebellions of the New Left. From the late 1930s into the early 1950s, Partisan Review would hold as its central objective a “radical appropriation of modernism for the purpose of renewing the culture and politics of the American left”. By the end of the 1960s, Partisan Review had completed its drift from radical dissidence into cultural orthodoxy, and now largely rebuked any contemporary countercultural movements.