A Partisan View: Five Decades in the Politics of Literature

· Routledge
Ebook
312
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Since its founding in 1937, "Partisan Review" has been one of the most important and culturally influential journals in America. Under the legendary editorship of William Phillips and Philip Rahv, "Partisan Review" began as a publication of the John Reed Club, but soon broke away to establish itself as a free voice of critical dissent. As such, it counteracted the inroads of cultural Stalinism and took up the fight for aesthetic modernism at a time when the latter was fiercely contested by both the political left and right. In this work, William Phillips offers an account of his own part in the magazine's eventful history. As the magazine's editor, Edith Kurzweil, notes in her introduction, many of the literary and political disagreements that famously marked "Partisan Review"'s history originated in the editors' initial adherence to a programme of radical politics and avant-gardism. Although this proved increasingly unworkable, Phillips and Rahv, even from the outset, never allowed sectarian narrowness to determine the magazine's contents. Over the decades, "Partisan Review" published work by authors as far from radicalism as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens or from Marxist orthodoxy as Albert Camus and George Orwell. In literature, its contributors were as stylistically and intellectually varied as Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Lowell and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In short, "Partisan Review" featured the best fiction, poetry and essays of the 1940s and postwar decades. Beyond its literary preeminence, Partisan Review was famed as the most representative journal of the New York Intellectuals.

About the author

William Phillips

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.