Skip to main content

History of Virginia Quarterly Review

The Virginia Quarterly Review and Its Contributors

Its reviews will include chiefly four types: descriptive reviews, giving rather a reflection of the book than a discussion, thematic reviews that treat an important book or group of books from one significant point of view; essay reviews, interesting when a thoughtful reviewer has an original view, to develop for which the discussion of the book in hand gives a fruitful text; and analytic reviews wherein the specialist weighs for the general reader the values of a work. Short reviews and notices may be carried but the preference will be given to reviews that are themselves critical studies of value.

The Virginia Quarterly Review, 1925–1935

June 11, 2009

The Virginia Quarterly Review was first published by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in the spring of 1925. Conceived as a “national journal of discussion,” the journal was created by liberal Southern educators who sought to cultivate a “fellowship of uncongenial minds” among editors, writers and readers in the South, in an era when the region was publicly derided for its lack of intellectual leadership and debate.

A Southern Chronicle

Since the founding of The Virginia Quarterly Review, one topic has turned up again and again: the journal’s native region. The culture, economy, past, and future of the American South have presented the Review with a constantly changing and yet stubbornly persistent set of anxieties and hopes. To survey the essays on the South that have appeared in these pages is to survey much of the region's history in the 20th century.