The Kenyon Review

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The Kenyon Review is a quarterly American literary magazine based at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio . Under the editorship of John Crowe Ransom in the years 1939-1959, it was one of the leading literary magazines in the USA and was at this time one of the most important mouthpieces of New Criticism , a formalistic school of literary theory. Today, less theoretical texts appear here than those of contemporary literature, especially poetry.

history

In 1937 Gordon Keith Chalmers was elected president of the provincial college in Gambier, which had been quite insignificant up to that time; He immediately set himself the goal of founding a college literary magazine , also on the advice of his wife Roberta Teale Swartz . In the same year, through the mediation of Robert Frost , he succeeded in recruiting John Crowe Ransom as a professor of poetry. In his years at Vanderbilt University, Ransom had made a name for himself as one of the country's leading literary critics and at that time wanted to return to literature only after the agrarian-conservative movement of the Southern Agrarians , which he supported , had practically dissolved. Ransom was followed by two of his most promising students - the young poets Randall Jarell and Robert Lowell - to Gambier in 1938 . Soon it was decided to set up a college literary magazine. The first edition of the Kenyon Review appeared in the winter of 1939; Ransom was the publisher, and Philip Blair Rice was his deputy . In the next few years the paper became one of the most important publications of New Criticism , with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks publishing some of their most important essays here.

literature

Bibliographic data

Anthologies with contributions to the Kenyon Review

  • John Crowe Ransom (Ed.): The Kenyon Critics: Studies in Modern Literature from the Kenyon Review . World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York 1951.
  • Robie Macauly (Ed.): Gallery of Modern Fiction: Stories From the Kenyon Review . Salem Press, New York 1966.

Secondary literature

  • Ronald S. Berman: Macauley's Kenyon Review: The View from the Sixties In: The Sewanee Review 87: 3, 1979. pp. 500-507.
  • Kirk R. Emmert: Kenyon Review . In: Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton (Eds.): The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America . Greenwood Press, Westport CT 1999. pp. 261-268. ( ISBN 0313213909 )
  • Gordon Hutner: Reviewing America: John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review . In: American Quarterly 44: 1, 1992. pp. 101-114.
  • Marian Janssen: The Kenyon Review, 1939-1970: A Critical History . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1990. ISBN 0807115223

Web links