There were a dozen of them in the tiny, crowded space, loud with talk and typewriters, and they were busy getting out the little eight-page daily that gave them their chance to live in Paris in the Nineteen Twenties.
The warriors of Xi’an stood in darkness for 2,000 years, watching over their dead emperor. He was Qin, pronounced Chin, whose successors built the Great Wall and gave a name to China. The warriors are ranked in battalions, archers, cavalry...
Unfortunately, Robert Boyers, in his Lionel Trilling, succumbs to this temptation to imitate his subject’s style; and this fault gravely weakens his attempt to renew Trilling’s value for modern criticism and culture.
Some of William Faulkner’s remarks about his work are now almost as famous as some phrases in the work itself. He quoted Sherwood Anderson’s advice to him in New Orleans that he should go home and write about what he knew, that patch of...
What a bad time it has been for the nation’s best-known historians—that is, for the small number of historical writers, some affiliated with academic institutions and some not, whose books regularly inhabit the bestseller lists, whose faces...
This penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold’s letters covers the years 1879—1884.1879 was his 57th year and the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, his debut as a poet. Since...
What I do want to talk about is the packaging and marketing of the Civil War as part of a larger commodification of cultural desire in which the making of Turner’s film and his participation in it become exemplary. I wish to speak, that is...
In the heart of downtown Aberdeen, the tea room is the Tastie Tattie Shop. Today’s menu features tatties and chili, and the girl I give my order to is wearing a stud in her nose. Aberdeen, the Granite City, looks built to last, but the...
Robert Boyers has written a subtle and rewarding study of R. P. Blackmur. He comments well on the central terms and concepts in Blackmur’s criticism, and he provides sharp and sensible examinations of the famous essays on Yeats, Eliot...