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James Southall Wilson

James Southall Wilson (1880–1963) was a nationally renowned scholar, the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and founding editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1925 to 1931.

Author

Henry James and Herman Melville

Henry James; the Major Phase. By F. O. Matthiessen. Oxford University Press. $2.50. Herman Melville; the Tragedy of Mind. By William Ellery Sedgwick. Harvard University Press. $2.75. Not long after the death of Henry James, I was told of an incide [...]

Shakespeare in the Interpretation of the Time

Shakespeare's Satire. By Oscar James Campbell. Oxford University Press. $3.75. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man. By Theodore Spencer. The Macmillan, Company. $2.75. The past twelve months have seen published three new Shakespeare studies of m [...]

Time and Virginia Woolf

By the close of the nineteenth century the novel in England had attained a surface perfection that possessed a mellow beauty suggesting either ripeness or decay, Hardy, Stevenson, James each had color, form, and a conscious mastery of an art that he [...]

American Panorama

Children of God. By Vardis Fisher. New York: Harper and Brothers. $3.00. Christ in Concrete. By Pietro di Donate Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. $2.50. Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, By James T. Farrell. New York: The Vangard Press [...]

The Figure a Poet Makes

Collected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt and Company. $5.00. Sir Henry Irving said that a good actor makes the mold for his own form in the company with which he acts. He cannot fit himself into the mold left by another actor. Th [...]

Ellen Glasgow: Ironic Idealist

The Virginia Edition of the Novels of Ellen Glasgow, Twelve Volumes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $140.00. Even after deflating scoffers and critical historians have done their worst there have been Virginians who remain in numbers and i [...]

Shakespeare and His Friends

Shakespeare: Man and Artist. By Edgar I. Fripp. New York: Oxford University Press. Two volumes. $15.00. William Shakespeare. By Leslie Hotson. New York: Oxford University Press. $3.00. In "Shakespeare: Man and Artist," two big volu [...]

The Southern States in Fiction

None Shall Look Back. By Caroline Gordon. New York: Charles Scrib-ner's Sons. $2.75. Bugles Blow No More. By Clifford Dowdey. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. $2.50. Children of Strangers. By Lyle Saxon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $2.50. [...]

What Happens to Shakespeare

Shakespeare. By John Middleton Murry, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.00. What Happens in Hamlet. By J, Dover Wilson. New York: The Macmillan Company. $3.50. Hamlet Bibliography and Reference Guide, 1877-1935. By Anton A. Raven. Chicago: U [...]

Amy Lowell and Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay: A Biography. By Edgar Lee Masters. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.00. Amy Lowell By S. Foster Damon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $5.00. The publication of biographies of Vachel Lindsay and of Amy Lowell represents the [...]

The Changing Novel

Suppose you were asked to select a representative English or American novel of the past lustrum, what could you answer? The catch is in the word "representative." Different as they were, Scott or Jane Austen is a representative English nove [...]

Ellen Glasgow’s Novels

The Old Dominion Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow. The Voice of the People, The Battle-Ground, The Deliverance, The Miller of Old Church, Virginia, Barren Ground, The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Polly. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and [...]

Enter a Novelist

Anthony Adverse. By Hervey Allen. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. $3.00. Nothing, so far as I know, has been published before in America in the least like Hervey Allen's "Anthony Adverse." It is as nearly as its author could make it the c [...]

Four English Novels

Pocahontas. By David Garnett. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50, The Bulpington of Blnp. By H. G. Wells. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.50. The Narrow Comer. By W. Somerset Maugham. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. F [...]

Poor-White and Negro

The Store. By T. S. Stribling. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. The books credited to Mr. T. S. Stribling by his publishers numbered ten before the printing of "The Store." Among them have been such successes as "Bi [...]

Back-Country Novels

Bright Skin. By Julia Peterkin. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Mcrrill Company. $2.50. Amber Satyr. By Roy Flannagan. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.00. The Weather Tree. By Maristan Chapman. New York: The Viking Press. $2.50. Tobacco Road. By E [...]

Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock, By Willa Cather. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. I do not know that it has ever been told of Sainte-Beuve that once he visited a dear friend soon after the birth of her child, and the mother, remembering his penchant for dis [...]

Emily Dickinson and the Ghosts

The Life and Mind of limiiy Dickinson. By Genevieve Tagnard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $4.00. Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor. By MacGrcgor Jenkins. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. $3.00. The writing of a modern biography has somethi [...]

The New Laureate

Poems (Complete in One Volume). By John Masefield. New York: The Macmillan Company. $5.00. In the appointment of John Masefield as poet laureate to fill the vacancy made by the death of Robert Bridges there is a representative significance. In the [...]

Whirligigs of Time and Taste

The Profession of Poetry and Other Lectures. By H. W. Garrod. New York: Oxford University Press. $4.50. Form and Style in Poetry. By W. P. Ker. New York: The Macmillan Company. $4.00. The Cycle of Modern Poetry. By G. R. Elliott. Princeton: Princet [...]

A Plutarch for Virginia

The Virginia Plutarch. By Philip Alexander Bruce, LL.D. 2 volumes. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. $9.00. The importance of "The Virginia Plutarch" lies in its scope, in its essential sympathy and understanding of the backgr [...]

Leaders in the Desert

I But has the South lost all leadership? The answers to that question—there have been answers a-plenty —are of three kinds. First, the patronizing voice characteristic of a certain very young but very "intelligent minority" wholly conce [...]

American Poetry - 1927

American Poetry—1927 — a Miscellany. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. $2.50. The Women at Point Sur. By Robinson Jeffers. New York: Boni and Liveright. $2.50. Branches of Adam. By John Gould Fletcher. London: Faber and Gwyer. 6 s. net. [...]

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.

Robert Frost: American Poet

Collected Poems. By Robert Frost, New York: Henry Holt and Company. $5.00. There is a respect in which Robert Frost is the most fortunate poet in America. He has never been exploited: neither by himself nor anyone else. How familiar the specta [...]

Romance Returns

SardHarker. By John Masefield. New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.The Green Hat. By Michael Arlen. New York: George H. Doran Co. $2.50.Balisand. By Joseph Hergesheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.The Little French Girl. By Anne Douglas Sedgwick. [...]

Before the Mayflower

Before the Mayflower. By J. H. R. Yardley. London: Heincmann, Limited. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $5.00. The story of Virginia's colonization has become more familiar through the school histories and the novels written around [...]

Ellen Glasgow: 1941

In This Our Life, By Ellen Glasgow. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.S0. "A great tradition is an expensive luxury." It is Asa Timberlake, the one of her people in Ellen Glasgow's "In This Our Life" that the author [...]

Apollo in Doubt

An Anthology of Pure Poetry. By George Moore. New York: Boni and Liveright. $2.00.New Poems. By John Drinkwater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $1.25.Bitter Brew. By Cale Young Rice. New York and London: The Century Company. $1.50.Sonata and Other [...]

The Perennial Rooster

Porgy. By DuBose Heyward. Decorated by Theodore Nadejen. New York: George Doran Company. $3.00.Said the Fisherman. By Marmaduke Pickthall. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $3.00.The Tale of Genji. By Lady Murasaki. Translated by Arthur Waley. Boston: Hough [...]

The Young Man Poe

IOur age we like to think of as a scientific one. We would clear up all the mysteries; resolve the compounds into their elements, and having named them, one by one, docket them away for reference. We are not content with tracking physiological life b [...]

The Novelist as Artist

A Certain Measure. By Ellen Glasgow. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.50. "Nevertheless, there are arts, and the novel is one of them." I do not think that Ellen Glasgow would agree with me that the conception of the novel as a form [...]

Fielding, Sterne, and Dickens

The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne. By Wilbur L. Cross. 2 vols. New Haven: The Yale University Press. $7.00. Fielding the Novelist. By Frederic T. Blanchard. New Haven: The Yale University Press. $6.00. The Days of Dickens. By Arthur L. Ha [...]

Second Debut of Emily Dickinson

Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham. Harper and Brothers. $3.00. Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. By Millicent Todd Bingham. Harper and Brothers. $3.75. [...]

Poe and the Biographers

Israfel: the Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. By Hervey, Allen. New York: Doran and Company. 2 vols. $10.00. I Count no man happy till you know the manner of his death." The Greeks believed in that epigram. Today we might paraphrase [...]

The Faculty of Poets

The Name and Nature of Poetry. By a. E. Housrnan. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.00. The Use of Poetry. By T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $2.00. Form in Modern Poetry. By Herbert Read. New York: Sheed and Ward. $1.00. Reason [...]

Breaking the Solid South

November 6, 1928, is one of those occasional days that are singled out by circumstance for remembrance. It may or may not prove important that it was the day on which Herbert Hoover was elected president. It remains to be seen whether it is the last [...]