Louis Rubin should have been with us. One year short of Street’s magic dozen, 1946—57, he abandoned journalism to earn distinction at Hollins College and then the University of North Carolina as a teacher, critic, author, publisher, and...
When he came of age, Thomas Jefferson inherited considerable property from his father in Albemarle County, Virginia, and he chose a site not far from Shadwell, his birthplace, as the seat of his own estate. He called it “Monticello,”...
The publication on Independence Day 1981 of the concluding volume of Dumas Malone’s great Jefferson biography has inspired almost as much celebration of the author as reflection on the post-presidential years of his great subject. That is...
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...
War has been described as the most successful of all of our cultural traditions, a dehumanizing reality confirmed by Ernest Hemingway when he once observed that many a good man “will die like a dog for no good reason.” As a hand-me-down...
In The Beauty of Inflections, Jerome J. McGann sounds a compelling call for “socio-historical” criticism of literature. His book addresses Keats, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and the...
Many times each year the reviewer is called upon to answer the question “Do we really need yet another book about the Civil War?” Surprisingly often the answer is a tentative “Yes!” Considerable stores of new information are assembled into...
Future historians who try to assess contemporary developments in Greece may be inclined to give a great deal of weight to the military junta that ruled the country from April 1967 until July 1974. They would be wrong. The junta, born in...
In her highly acclaimed first book, Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene focused on a little known patch of the large and complex quilt that is the Southern civil rights movement. She peopled it with characters who were both courageous...
