William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
408
William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
408eBook
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Overview
During William Gilmore Simms's life (1806-1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer's hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays. Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms's intellectual interests.
To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms's reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author's reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern "backwoods" humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville's novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms's attention. Moltke-Hansen's introduction to part two examines Simms's roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611172966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of South Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2014 |
| Series: | William Gilmore Simms Initiatives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 719 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
James E. Kibler, Jr., has published or edited six volumes on Simms, the most recent of which is Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, also published by the University of South Carolina Press. His edition of Simms's Woodcraft is forthcoming. He is the founding editor of the Simms Review, now in its twentieth year. Kibler is also the author of four works of fiction, a collection of poetry, and Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story, published by the University of South Carolina Press and for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction.
David Moltke-Hansen is the former head of the South Carolina Historical Society, the Southern Historical Collection, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and he served as the founding director of the digital William Gilmore Simms Initiatives of the University of South Carolina. Moltke-Hansen has edited History and Women, Culture and Faith: Selected Writings of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Volume 3—Intersections: History, Culture, Ideology and William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War: Consequences for a Southern Man of Letters, published by the University of South Carolina Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on the Text, or, the Devil and Noah Webster xiii
Introduction: The Man of Letters as Critic 1
Part I Literature
Literature's Long View James Everett Kibler 15
Reviews
The Disowned and Pelham (February 1829) Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 43
Edge Hill; or, the Family of the Fitzroyals, a Novel (1 June 1829) James E. Heath's 45
The Shepherd's Calendar (15 June 1829) James Hogg's 46
Address Delivered Before the Society of Friends of Ireland (1 July 1829) Charles R. Carroll's 50
Charming (October 1842) William Ellery 55
Whittier's Poems (October 1843) John Greenleaf 56
Arabella Stuart (May 1844) G. P. R. James's 59
Poems (August 1844) Prances Anne Kemble Butler's 62
Literature in Ancient Rome (January 1845) 66
Home (June 1845) Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 73
Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces. Volumes 1 and 2 (June and September 1845) Jean Paul Frederich Richter's 76
Translation of The Poems and Ballads of Johann Schiller (August 1845) Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 78
Sybil, or the Two Nations (October 1845) Benjamin D'Israeli's 80
Poe's Poetry (November 1845) 82
Laneton Parsonage (April 1849) Elizabeth Missing Sewell's 87
Merry Mount; a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony (April 1849) John Motley's 89
The Adirondack; or Life in the Woods (October 1849) J. T. Headley's 92
A Fable for Critics (October 1849) James Russell Lowell's 95
Kavanagh (October 1849) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 100
Poems (October 1849) William Cowper's 102
New Novels (April 1850) 103
Latter-Day Pamphlets (July 1850) Sir Thomas Carlyle's 105
Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing of tire United States (July 1850) Henry William Herbert's 107
The Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell (September 1850) 109
Poems (September 1850) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 111
Poems (September 1850) Robert Browning's 113
In Memoriam (November 1850) Alfred Lord Tennyson's 114
The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind (November 1850) William Wordsworth's 115
The House of the Seven Gables (July 1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne's 116
Memoirs of William Wordsworth (July 1851) Christopher Wordsworth's 118
Memoirs (1852) Margaret Fuller's 119
Moby-Dick (January 1852) Herman Melville's 121
Pierre, or the Ambiguities (October 1852) Herman Melville's 122
The Blithedale Romance (October 1852) Nathaniel Hawthorne's 122
The Forest (January 1853) J. V. Huntington's 123
Bleak House (January 1854) Charles Dickens' 124
Cranford (January 1854) Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell's 129
Anthons's Manual of Greek Literature (April 1854) 130
Specimens of the British Poets (April 1854) Thomas Campbell's 132
Writings (April 1854) Thomas De Quincey's 132
Hypatia (April 1854) Charles Kingsley's 134
Translation of The Works of Apuleius (July 1854) Hudson Gurney's 135
The Planter's Northern Bride (July 1854) Caroline Lee Hentz's 136
Poems and Parodies (July 1854) Phoebe Carey's 137
The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (July 1854) 140
Walden (8 February 1855) Henry David Thoreau's 141
Our Literary Docket-New Publications: William Cullen Bryant and Lady Morgan (20 May 1859) 142
Our Literary Docket-Novelists, George Eliot, James Hungerford, and Charlotte Mary Yonge (31 May 1859) 146
Our Literary Docket-Lord John Campbell's Shakspeare (3 June 1859) 148
Our Literary Docket-Charles Lever's Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier (21 June 1859) 150
Our Literary Docket-Anthony Trollope's The Bertrams and Doctor Thorne (22 June 1859) 152
Our Literary Docket-Bartholomew Rivers Carroll Jr., Hayne, and Timrod (9 August 1859) 153
Our Literary Docket-Allen Hampden's Hartley Norman (20 August 1859) 159
Poems (16 February 1860) James Clarence Mangan's 163
Current Irish Literature from Haverty (2 October 1860) 165
Poetical Works (24 February 1866) Martin Farquhar Tupper's 167
The Book of the Sonnet (5 April 1867) Leigh Hunt's 171
Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (4 June 1867) John William De Forest's 175
Æneid (29 June 1867) John Conington's 176
The Late Henry Timrod (19 October 1867) 179
Poems (9 November 1867) Charles Warren Stoddard's 188
Putnam's Magazine (22 January 1870) 191
Part II Civilization
A Critical Revolution and a Revolutionary Critic David Moltke-Hansen 197
Review Essays
Francois Guizot, Democracy in France (April 1849) 217
Tuckerman's Essays and Essayists (July 1850) 261
Ellet's Women of the Revolution (July 1850) 294
The Southern Convention (September 1850) 333
Works Cited 375
Index 383
What People are Saying About This
The 'southern values' that heated the cultural wars of antebellum America and would erupt in Civil War receive no more careful articulation than in the literary commentaries and cultural essays of the South's foremost public intellectual, William Gilmore Simms. The most trenchant of these have been collected in William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization edited by James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke Hansen.
The present volume is a welcome exception and does much to restore William Gilmore Simms to his proper place as the South's leading man of letters before, during, and after the war.
Finely edited and handsomely produced, this important collection of hard-to-find reviews by the antebellum South's leading man of letters will benefit anyone interested in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century America. For those interested in southern literary culture, this volume confirms Simms's reputation as a prominent intellectual. But as this valuable collection demonstrates beyond any doubt, Simms also played a key role in the broader transatlantic debates over romanticism, publishing reviews of work by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Dickens, and many other leading authors.
While working on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville famously noted that 'there are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.' As this terrific round-up of his criticism reveals, William Gilmore Simms was one of the few who were very much awake (even if he did find Moby-Dick 'sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous'). For all that has been written on Simms, we may have the fullest sense of his intellectual commitments here in the cut-and-thrust world of America's nascent literary criticism.
While William Gilmore Simms has always been known primarily for his fiction, famous especially for historical novels set in the era of the American Revolution, he was in his own day a leading man of letters, editor, critic, essayist. His reviews and critical essays collected here show a remarkable range of interest and expertise, and his opinions stand the test of time. A welcome volume.
William Gilmore Simms ventured many genres (the novel, the romance, poetry, history, biography), but may have been best at criticism. By making accessible his judgments, both trenchant and wayward, Kibler and Moltke-Hansen have rendered a service to those wishing to understand American literary criticism and Southern ideas.