Literary Quarterly Research Articles

The Idea of a Colony: Eliot and Stevens in Australia

The Idea of a Colony:Eliot and Stevens in Australia Benjamin Madden THAT MODERNIST LITERATURE encountered a frequently hostile reaction from its earliest audiences, whom we tend now to reproach in retrospect for their "shortsightedness" and "provincialism," is true just about everywhere. But in the antipodes, those reproaches have tended to be both more severe and more literal: "provincialism" isn't just a metaphor in the provinces, let alone the colonies, and therefore we—good, tasteful cosmopolitans—tend to round on our ancestors who expressed those "provincial" tastes with extra force. So much force, in fact, that we rarely pause to complicate reproach with explanation. Why would we, when the cultural prestige of what we now call literary modernism is at an all-time high? And yet, there is some circularity here: Australian readers rejected modernism because they were provincial, and the evidence of their provincialism is their rejection of modernism. In this essay, I will show that Australian anti-modernism has a livelier and more complex intellectual genealogy than the cliché of provincialism would suggest, and that this background helps to account for the very different receptions accorded to the poetry of two of the twentieth century's major modernists, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I will begin by describing the Nietzscheaninflected anti-modernism of the Vision group in the 1920s, and suggest that their ambition should be read as an attempt to articulate a specific cultural project for Australia in the postwar world. Modernism, they concluded, was inimical to that project. Shortly thereafter, however, the site of modernism's reception shifted from the public sphere of practicing poets and critics to the academy, where the increasing influence of the Leavisites—whose own cultural mission dovetailed in some interesting, if accidental, ways with the Vision group—made a version of the modernist canon a fait accompli. But that canon was circumscribed in certain ways, notably by the availability of texts: in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian readers relied on London publishing houses for their imported reading matter. For an American writer's work to be disseminated widely in Australia, their work would have to be anthologized, or released by a British publisher. This is how Stevens's work came to be known in Australia during the 1950s. That Stevens's poetry was disseminated at a [End Page 77] moment when Australia was shifting its cultural and political allegiances from Britain to the United States was its good fortune: against the intellectual backdrop of anti-modernist vitalism, it could be received and read as a potential escape from the Eliotic impasse. One of the first expressions of modernism in the antipodes was, fittingly enough, a kind of anti-modernism: I am referring to Vision: A Literary Quarterly, edited by Frank C. Johnson, Jack Lindsay, and Kenneth Slessor, and published in four issues beginning in May 1923 and concluding in February 1924. Vision shares many of the essential characteristics of the modernist little magazine, not least the brevity of its lifespan and the pugnacity of its tone. Reflecting on his own experiences with little magazines, Ezra Pound famously recommended "a program—any program. A review that can't announce a program probably doesn't know what it thinks or where it is going" (703). On a rhetorical level, at least, Vision would not have disappointed: The object of this Quarterly is primarily to provide an outlet for good poetry, or for any prose that liberates the imagination by gaiety or fantasy. Unless gaiety is added to realism, the pestilence of Zola or the locomotor ataxia of Flaubert must finally attack the mind. We would vindicate the youthfulness of Australia, not by being modern, but by being alive. Physical tiredness, jaded nerves and a complex superficiality are the stigmata of Modernism. We prefer to find Youth by responding to the image of beauty, to vitality of emotion. ("Foreword" I: 2) Its contemptuous vision of "Modernism" sees the malign influence of Zola and Flaubert extending into the 1920s, alongside a host of contemporary offenders: When Picasso hung a geometrical pattern in gold paint in the last Autumn Salon, or Satie put typewriters in the orchestra of "Parade," they were...

Valérie Baisnée, “Through the long corridor of distance”: Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies

“Writing about one’s past involves both invention and exorcisms: finding what was lost and would have been permanently lost otherwise; and freeing oneself of the burden of it, when it is a burden.” Charles Brasch, Journals, 1968. In her introduction to her study of autobiographies of New Zealand women, Valerie Baisnee reminds us that Charles Brasch, founder and editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary quarterly, encouraged autobiographical writing with his “Beginnings” series in...

Homage to George Core: Essays and Notes in Honor of his Retirement

Homage to George CoreEssays and Notes in Honor of his Retirement Robert Benson (bio) George became the editor of the Sewanee Review in 1973, and from then until the present year his editorial and critical vision has made the oldest continuously published quarterly in the United States also the best. Without changing the magazine’s essential character, he made the Review less deliberately southern, and his introduction of issues devoted to specific themes or subjects has given the Sewanee Review an intellectual coherence unique among literary quarterlies. Editing the Review made it necessary for George to postpone or abandon many of his own scholarly and critical projects, works that we are undoubtedly poorer without. He was in his office hard at his editorial business on weekends and holidays for more than forty years. As an editor George Core was sane and sympathetic. A writer of graceful and precise prose, he had an eye for stylistic blunders and infelicities unmatched in my experience. Even the most sensitive writers profited from George’s suggested revisions and critical advice. The very first time George read something I had written, he returned it and said he liked it, but the typescript had so much blue pencil on it I could hardly read what he said he liked. George has continued to be my best and most demanding editor. For that and for his generous-hearted friendship I will always be grateful. George Core has assured the place of the Sewanee Review in the Republic of Letters, and his critical and editorial wisdom has earned him a prominent and permanent place in the history of American literature. Of his magazine, George once wrote that “over its long life the Sewanee Review has often been nurtured by blind good luck.” George Core’s tenure as editor may be the best luck this venerable quarterly has ever had. [End Page 533] CHRISTIAN WIMAN The first time I ever heard from George Core—by letter, of course; typed on Sewanee Review stationary, of course—I was living alone in a cabin on a ranch in south Texas trying to finish a long poem. I was somewhere in my twenties, somewhere in south Texas, somewhere just south of sanity. The poet W. S. Di Piero had made the introduction because he knew I was trying to write critical prose, and he had been helped by Mr. Core when he was young. I had sent, by way of introduction, a bunch of book reviews I had been writing for newspapers, which were so bristly, balking, and snarling they must have been something like the monster books in Harry Potter that literally bare their fangs and try to eat their readers. Mr. Core saw right through them, and noticed the grain of good that was in them, and promptly wrote back to give me an assignment on—as I recall—Renaissance poets. He didn’t seek credentials or impose restrictions. He didn’t ask what I knew about Renaissance poets and try to guide the assignment to some safe shoal. He just read what I sent and said, basically, Go. And then kept saying it. There is no overstating the affection and gratitude we feel for someone who trusts our work before we have come to do so ourselves, someone who leads us to trust our more eccentric impulses—at least when those impulses have turned out to be, as they have in my own case, the main current of the work. I will always be grateful to George Core for giving me room and respect at a crucial time, and for reminding me again and again what a respectable literary life—that there might be such a thing!—might look like. PHILLIP PAROTTI If debts are to be wholly calculated in terms of money, I can never afford to repay so much as a portion that I owe to George Core, first for the generous, gifted, and expert editorial attention he has always given my work but most of all for the warm and doubly generous friendship that he has always extended to me. We have never met. Instead...

Memoirs of a New York Intellectual Manqué

said Guerry was pursuing her “all over Tennessee” trying to get her to say something against Allen. Guerry on February 16 accepted Tate’s resignation because of a certain report he had received. It turned out that Mildred Haun, whom Tate had promoted to managing editor, had told Guerry Tate tried to seduce her. “Can you imagine my having an affair with a woman so ugly?” Tate asked Peter Taylor. “She looked like a little boy.” Her friends Lon and Fannie Cheney said she was “a strange little witch out of the mountains. . . . Her relations with men were always peculiar and elementary.” She knew about Elizabeth Hardwick, and Tate wasn’t paying her any attention. Guerry and Tate agreed to request her resignation. But Tate learned that she wasn’t the whole basis for Guerry’s decision to accept his own resignation. Tate left Sewanee in April to take an editorial job at Henry Holt and to marry Caroline again. He wrote Guerry, “you listened to the reports of students and other miscellaneous persons, but not to me; you moved, I am sorry to say, as a prosecuting attorney, not as my friend.” He didn’t tell Guerry that he and Caroline were remarrying—“to punish him.” It took Tate almost three years to land the job he wanted, and it was over in less than two years. But in that time, wrote Monroe K. Spears, the editor from 1952 to 1961, he changed the Sewanee Review’s “nature decisively, revolutionized its format, quadrupled its circulation, and brought it into the first rank of American literary quarterlies. Since that time he has . . . been generous of advice and help” (“Homage to Allen Tate”).

Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons

JORDAN J. DOMINY Savannah State University Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons WHILE CLASSROOMS OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES SEEM THE FRONT LINES in the academic study of literature, literary and critical periodicals have served an important role in forming dominant ideas about American literature and culture. At no time was this truer than during the years leading up to and during World War II, when English departments as we know them today began to emerge, influenced greatly by novel critical approaches and the model of scholarly discourse conducted through the literary quarterly. Many successful quarterlies found university backing, and some, such as Kenyon Review and Southern Review, were edited by English professors who promoted the New Criticism. Unsurprisingly, its tenets became the dominant mode of engagement with literature in classrooms and scholarship for a generation. However, attempts to influence notions about literature have not been limited to large quarterlies with strong circulation numbers. Smaller, non-academic periodicals have certainly had agendas concerning the best purpose for literature, its scholarship, and canonicity. South Today, a small literary magazine edited and published by Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling out of Clayton, Georgia, from 1936 to 1945, highlights this agenda in the particular case of literatures of the US South. The concurrent publication of South Today with major critical quarterlies demonstrates important, divergent trends in how intellectuals and authors in the United States were thinking at that time about the canonicity and the institutionalization of literary studies because of its attention to global politicalandsocialissuesinaliterary,regionalcontext.Scholarlyinterest in a canon of Southern literature arose during the World War II years and coincided with a collective desire for a national literature of democratic values, a desire that eventually led South Today into obscurity. Placing South Today in dialogue with more recognizable quarterlies and the larger magazine culture of the early to middle twentieth century in terms of purpose, editorial policy, and scholarly approach is quite 30 Jordan J. Dominy fruitful, especially in terms of revising predominant narratives of the modern as related to the development of the formalized study of Southern and American literature. Indeed, as George Core stated at a conference on Southern letters celebrating the fiftieth year after the founding of Southern Review.: The critical quarterly as we now know it was largely founded in response to modernism—to the work of writers like Ford,Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. At first, magazinessuchasFord’sEnglishReviewandhisTransatlanticReviewwereintended primarily to provide outlets for fiction and poetry; then increasingly the emphasis turned to criticism—a criticism that would explain the obscure and pithy indirectionsofthemodernistmannerandstylebypenetratingitsmasks,illuminating its shadowed modes, and translating its muted voices. The major American literary quarterlies since 1935—the Southern, Kenyon, Sewanee, and Hudson reviews—therefore have existed largely to explain modern literature. (190) This suggests that the advent of scholarly literary reviews was a definitive early indicator of the late modernism Fredric Jameson defines asthe“ideologyofmodernism,”thatis,thecodificationandcanonization by intellectuals, art critics, and literary critics of the artistic practices and works of pre-war modernists, especially high modernists. Jameson calls late modernism “an American invention” and “a product of the Cold War” (165). With strict adherence to codified modernist aesthetics, late modernism valued form over content, and Jameson points to the New Criticism as a key factor in the late modernist turn. Such emphasis in art and literature became significant in the post-war years for America’s battle against communism because it enabled the intelligentsia to keep leftist and progressive politics in check. For late modernism, Jameson explains, “high literature and high art mean the aesthetic minus culture, the aesthetic field radically cleansed and purified of culture” (179). Art and literature with all of its contexts—political, social, or otherwise —strippedbecomes democratically safe, but only in regardstotechnique and forms. The purging of contexts came on the heels of a leftist turn in American culture during the Great Depression, as union membership increased and artists, writers, and intellectuals became more active in leftist politics. At nearly the same moment that publications such as Partisan Review and New Masses began to define and extol to young, aspiring writers a proletarian literature that joined working-class realities,radicalpolitics,andartisticinnovation(Denning201...

Stories in collision

Granta: Medicine Issue 120 Summer 2012 Granta Publications Why would Granta , a literary quarterly, publish an issue called Medicine ? At the September launch in London, editor John Freeman described the collection as the collision between the stories that we tell about our lives and the

Jejuri: A Pilgrimage into the Past and the Present

Arun Kolhatkar’s Jejuri is probably the only book of Indian poetry in English in recent times that has some claims of be considered as a possible commonwealth classic. Though it was first published in 1954 in the Opinion Literary Quarterly, it caught the attention of the critical world only it was awarded the Commonwealth Literary Prize of 1977.It has been hailed since then as the most extraordinary book of poems. It gives us a symbolic picture of modern predicament. The subject of Kolatkar’s sequence of poems is religion, and the relation between religion and culture. Kolatkar’s attitude is very different from treatments of the same them in modern Europe and America. The difference is not ideological; it arises out of an entirely distinct climate of sensibility. Kolatkar’s poetic mind, enlivened though it may be by irony and irreverence, remains paradoxically a combination of the negatively dark and even the joyous. It represents in the final analysis a modern adjustment (present) to an accepted tradition (past). Unlike some Western work, it is not nor an attempt to construct something in a godless universe.

The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage (An Excerpt)

(2008). The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage (An Excerpt) Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 5-35.

The Author Resurrected: The Paris Review 's Answer to the Age of Criticism

The Author Resurrected:The Paris Review's Answer to the Age of Criticism Usha Wilbers (bio) When the American literary quarterly the Paris Review came to life in 1953, its editors actively sought to wield influence over and shape the direction of American and—to a lesser extent—European letters. They nurtured aspirations to supply the American and European reading public with undiscovered high quality literature and aimed to do so without aligning themselves to any political or critical stance. During what has been called "the Age of Criticism," the Paris Review rejected literary criticism and the political bias of literary quarterlies such as Partisan Review and The Kenyon Review. Instead of assigning critics to appraise literary publications, the editors created an interview series in which the author was invited to reflect on his or her own work. Paradoxically, it can be argued that with its renowned interview series the Paris Review generated a new form of literary criticism. Furthermore, by consulting authors about the theory and practice of writing, the editors countered critical developments that had challenged the position of the author. In the Paris Review interview the author was given the opportunity to assume the role of the critic and create an often confessional self-portrait. As the following article argues, these texts are essentially performances in which the authors present themselves as they want to be viewed by the reader. Moreover, since each interview went through an extensive editorial process—comprising three stages—it can be argued that the Paris Review editors also influenced the way that the interviewee was portrayed. Despite this, the interviews have been received as unique critical documents and authentic statements from the authors. This article, which is based on extensive study of the Paris Review archives, charts the impact of the Paris Review interview. It also uncovers the editorial process preceding its publication, which will provide insight into the position of the author in these texts. The focus [End Page 192] will be on the period between 1953 and 1973, when the Paris Review was edited and produced from Paris. During these formative years the magazine's interview section developed into the prestigious series it is today. The Paris Review's Origins The Paris Review was founded by two Americans, Peter Matthiessen and Harold Humes, who during the early 1950s settled in Europe to further their writing careers. Absorbing the artistic currents in Paris, they aspired to create a literary magazine that would represent both American and European talent. In the process of founding the Paris Review and getting the first issue published, Matthiessen and Humes enlisted help from fellow American expatriates whom they had met mostly during their studies at Harvard and Yale. Among them were William Styron, Donald Hall, and George Ames Plimpton, who would run the Paris Review for exactly fifty years as editor-in-chief. By seeking exile in Paris, the editors of the Paris Review followed the footsteps of illustrious predecessors such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had settled in the city during the early decades of the twentieth century. Many of the writers who inhabited the Parisian writing communities in the 1950s longed to escape the conservative climate in the United States and identified with European intellectual currents, such as Sartre's Existentialism. However, Paris also attracted writers of the so-called Silent Generation, who declined to commit themselves to any political, cultural, or social discourse. The editors of the Paris Review belonged to this group, as Irwin Shaw—sometimes referred to as the pater familias of the Paris Review crowd—explains: It was that comparatively serene time when America, at least, was not engaged in any war and the phrase, The Silent Generation, was used to describe the young men and women of the era. While my friends talked a great deal and were unaggressively in favour of Adlai Stevenson, they bore President Eisenhower no malice and the description, unfair as it was, was perhaps as fitting for them as any other. They went off on no crusades, they did not seem to be tempted by the Left, either French, American or Russian, and if, for want of...

Volunteering at the Orphanage, Hue, Viet Nam, 1969

Susan Kramer O'Neill is the author of Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam (University of Massachusetts, 2004) and the coeditor of Vestal Review, a literary quarterly. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, online zines, and mainstream periodicals. This poem is based on her experiences as a U.S. Army nurse during the Vietnam War. Contact author: [email protected]. Art of Nursing is coordinated by Sylvia Foley, senior editor: [email protected].

Awakened Sexualities: Ancient Greece and Modern America

(2007). Awakened Sexualities: Ancient Greece and Modern America. Harrington Gay Men's Literary Quarterly: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 131-136.

Excerpt fromA Table for Two

(2007). Excerpt from A Table for Two. Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5-23.

Excerpt from An Emergence of Green

(2006). Excerpt from An Emergence of Green. Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 5-16.

From No Man's Land to Mother-Land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels

Not plunge into the complex jungle of human relationships and analyze them is leave the field the fascists and I won't and can't do that. (Wright, qtd. in Fabre 185) ... anything that is felt give out goodness and beauty, and that calls forth pleasure and satisfaction, in the physical or in the wider sense, can in the unconscious mind take the place of [the infant's perception of the mother's] ever-bountiful breast, and of the whole mother. Thus we speak of our own country as the motherland because in the unconscious mind our country may come stand our mother, and then it can be loved with feelings which borrow their nature from the relation her. (Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation 103) While serving as Director of the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker between 1937 and 1938, Richard Wright wrote an article the newspaper praising the launching of New Challenge, a black American literary quarterly that published first-rate black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Langston Hughes. Wright was particularly excited about the quarterly because for the first time in Negro history problems such as nationalism in literature, perspective, the relation of the Negro politics and social movements were formulated and discussed (Negro Writers 7). For those familiar with Wright's A Negro Writing, first published in New Challenge in 1937, it is obvious that he was applauding his own planned contribution the quarterly, as Blueprint deals first and foremost with the problem of nationalism black writers. Moreover, since the Daily Worker article and the New Challenge essay were written in the middle of 1937, it is safe say that Wright, then twenty-eight years old, was beginning formulate just what sort of contribution black American writing he would make during the next few years. The literary works Wright wrote between 1937 and 1941 focus explicitly on issues related nationalism, although scholars have yet explore this fact in depth. Remarkably, Wright's literary treatment of nationalism remains avant-garde since he reveals what many contemporary theorists have yet disclose: a complex insight into the deep psychology of nationalism. Like many contemporary theorists, Wright viewed nationalism as an historical phenomenon that constructs what Benedict Anderson has termed imagined communities people who in fact are anonymous each other but wish social communion. Wright also perceived nationalism as a divisive political ideology that must be supplanted with a Communist ideology he believed necessary the emancipation of the working class. But Wright's most significant contribution is his synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his effort portray critically the insidious appeal of nationalistic ideas the infantile desires of working-class men. For Wright, the danger posed by nationalism was its unconscious appeal the psyches of male workers. His Depression Era works suggests that, since all male workers are raised in a patriarchal society, their feelings of powerlessness can evoke feelings of emasculation. Wright shows how these feelings of emasculation can be intensified black men, since they are extra-oppressed by racism and are symbolically emasculated as boys in a racist discourse. In somewhat Oedipal terms, the black man is put in the position of having to kill the white man/father in order cancel his boy status. Wright's concern is that black working-class men are apt heed the call of black nationalists, precisely because they promise a reclamation of manhood and the goal of disposing of the white father - namely, the acquisition of the mother-land. In Lawd Today! (completed in 1938 and posthumously published in 1963) and Native Son (1940), Wright represents urban black men in the grip of such a racialized Oedipal struggle. His urban protagonists internalize the racist dynamic of the black boy-white father dialectic and are thus psychologically caught between an impulse act the black boy who submits (in various ways) whites and a desire be the man, which involves behaviors associated with the powerful white father. …

World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma

World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma

Durrell in Egypt

The Anglo-Egyptian Union, with its agreeable old building and spacious garden at Zamalek, was the social centre of the Personal Landscape writers. This literary quarterly, which ran for eight numbers, was edited by Robin Fedden, Bernard Spencer and Larry Durrell, and I remember sitting outside the club house, with two or three of us, and Bernard coming from the gate bearing copies of a new issue. It must have been in 1942. The British Council thought of the Anglo-Egyptian Union as a place where British and Egyptian members might meet and mix socially. But Egyptians were slow to adopt the notion, which appeared to commit them too obviously to pro-Britishness. (I protested in vain against the term Anglo.) Sharing the same entrance and garden was the Egyptian Officers Club where I'm told Naguib plotted the overthrow of Farouk.

Index on Censorship

The author, a Polish poet and literary critic who is one of the editors of Zapis, wrote the following piece for the twelfth issue of the unofficial literary quarterly. Zapis 12 will be published in London this spring.

'The Sewanee Review' and the Editorial Performance

Economy is the word that will take us farthest in charting the anatomy of any publishing enterprise. That is especially true of the literary quarterly at the end of a century in which the quarterly has probably been the most important form of periodical so far as literature proper is concerned. Economy rings with the clear hard sound of commerce, but it embodies a larger suggestiveness within its metaphorical aura. Nothing is more costly than literature, nothing so easily corrupted by purely commercial considerations. Note that I insist upon the phrase literary quarterly, not little magazine, which is another kind of undertaking and another breed of cat. The literary quarterly, or critical review, publishes fiction and poetry in addition to criticism; the criticism appears as essays (formal and informal), essay-reviews, chronicles on new fiction and poetry (and drama in many quarterlies), and book reviews. The fiction and poetry in some ways exemplify, complement, and fortify the given quarterly's critical commitment. Criticism tends to occupy about two-thirds to three-quarters of the quarterly's space; sometimes it extends to social, political, and cultural criticism in such general magazines as the American Scholar, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Tale Review. The editors of some reviews so little understand the purpose of their magazines that they reduce book reviews to a negligible level and wait for each new book to prove itself as a classic (remaindered or otherwise) before having it reviewed. The editor of any quarterly worth his salt has a wide range of books reviewed promptly and thoroughly. (A bonus of this practice is an increase in paid advertising.) In contrast the editor of the little magazine chiefly publishes fiction and poetry, encouraging experiment and innovation. The confusion between the literary quarterly and the little magazine is typical of the many confusions in publishing today, in and out of the academy. The quarterly is often academically based, but one of the best, the Hudson Review (I948) is not; nor is the most famous, the Paris Review (I953), which is now distributed by Doubleday. Virtually all quarterlies lose money, and the university, itself a moneylosing (but tax-exempt) institution, can naturally and properly sponsor a literary quarterly and more than one scholarly journal, even though antipathy often exists between the authors for the two kinds of periodicals critics and scholars. The university also often gets good value for its money in supporting a press as well as periodicals (and some presses have periodicals departments). Generally speaking, if the university provides only personnel (salaries and

The Hound and Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly.

The Hound and Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly.

Literary Quarterlies in the 1960's

Literary Quarterlies in the 1960's