William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization

William Gilmore Simms

Description

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.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• HISTORY
• América
• Literature
• The Literary Society
• Precaution (novel)
• The Philosopher
• Superiority (short story)
• G. (novel)
• The Crock of Gold (novel)
• Latter-Day Pamphlets
• An Essay on Man
• Samuel Butler (novelist)
• An Essay on Criticism
• English poetry
• General officer
• Literary theory
• History of the Americas
• General
• American
• United States
• FL
• KY
• LA
• TN
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• MS
• SC
• Robert Browning
• NC
• AR
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• VA
• GA
• William Butler Yeats

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 07 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172966
• Langue: English

Extrait

William Gilmore Simms s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
William Gilmore Simms Initiatives: Texts and Studies Series
David Moltke-Hansen and Todd Hagstette, Series Editors
William Gilmore Simms s Unfinished Civil War: Consequences for a Southern Man of Letters
David Moltke-Hansen, ed.
William Gilmore Simms s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen, eds.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS S SELECTED REVIEWS ON Literature Civilization
EDITED BY
James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen,
with Ehren Foley

The University of South Carolina Press
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the generous support of the Watson-Brown Foundation to the William Gilmore Simms Initiatives of the University of South Carolina Libraries and by those who established the William Gilmore Simms Visiting Professorship at the South Caroliniana Library .
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
Manufactured in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simms, William Gilmore, 1806-1870.
[Essays. Selections]
William Gilmore Simms s selected reviews on literature and civilization / edited by James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen, with Ehren Foley.
pages cm. - (William Gilmore Simms Initiatives: Texts and Studies Series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-295-9 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-296-6 (ebook) I. Kibler, James E. II. Moltke-Hansen, David. III. Foley, Ehren. IV. Title.
PS2843.K55 2014
814 .3-dc23
2013013549
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Text, or, the Devil and Noah Webster
Introduction: The Man of Letters as Critic
Part I: Literature
Literature s Long View
James Everett Kibler, Jr .
REVIEWS
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton s The Disowned and Pelham (February 1829)
James E. Heath s Edge Hill; or, the Family of the Fitzroyals, a Novel (1 June 1829)
James Hogg s The Shepherd s Calendar (15 June 1829)
Charles R. Carroll s Address Delivered Before the Society of Friends of Ireland (1 July 1829)
William Ellery Channing (October 1842)
John Greenleaf Whittier s Poems (October 1843)
G. P. R. James s Arabella Stuart (May 1844)
Frances Anne Kemble Butler s Poems (August 1844)
Literature in Ancient Rome (January 1845)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick s Home (June 1845)
Jean Paul Frederich Richter s Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces . Volumes 1 and 2 (June and September 1845)
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton s Translation of The Poems and Ballads of Johann Schiller (August 1845)
Benjamin D Israeli s Sybil, or the Two Nations (October 1845)
Poe s Poetry (November 1845)
Elizabeth Missing Sewell s Laneton Parsonage (April 1849)
John Motley s Merry Mount; a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony (April 1849)
J. T. Headley s The Adirondack; or Life in the Woods (October 1849)
James Russell Lowell s A Fable for Critics (October 1849)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow s Kavanagh (October 1849)
William Cowper s Poems (October 1849)
New Novels (April 1850)
Sir Thomas Carlyle s Latter-Day Pamphlets (July 1850)
Henry William Herbert s Frank Forester s Fish and Fishing of the United States (July 1850)
The Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell (September 1850)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow s Poems (September 1850)
Robert Browning s Poems (September 1850)
Alfred Lord Tennyson s In Memoriam (November 1850)
William Wordsworth s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet s Mind (November 1850)
Nathaniel Hawthorne s The House of the Seven Gables (July 1851)
Christopher Wordsworth s Memoirs of William Wordsworth (July 1851)
Margaret Fuller s Memoirs (1852)
Herman Melville s Moby-Dick (January 1852)
Herman Melville s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (October 1852)
Nathaniel Hawthorne s The Blithedale Romance (October 1852)
J. V. Huntington s The Forest (January 1853)
Charles Dickens Bleak House (January 1854)
Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell s Cranford (January 1854)
Anthons s Manual of Greek Literature (April 1854)
Thomas Campbell s Specimens of the British Poets (April 1854)
Thomas De Quincey s Writings (April 1854)
Charles Kingsley s Hypatia (April 1854)
Hudson Gurney s Translation of The Works of Apuleius (July 1854)
Caroline Lee Hentz s The Planter s Northern Bride (July 1854)
Phoebe Carey s Poems and Parodies (July 1854)
The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (July 1854)
Henry David Thoreau s Walden (8 February 1855)
Our Literary Docket-New Publications: William Cullen Bryant and Lady Morgan (20 May 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Novelists, George Eliot, James Hungerford, and Charlotte Mary Yonge (31 May 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Lord John Campbell s Shakspeare (3 June 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Charles Lever s Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier (21 June 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Anthony Trollope s The Bertrams and Doctor Thorne (22 June 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Bartholomew Rivers Carroll Jr., Hayne, and Timrod (9 August 1859)
Our Literary Docket-Allen Hampden s Hartley Norman (20 August 1859)
James Clarence Mangan s Poems (16 February 1860)
Current Irish Literature from Haverty (2 October 1860)
Martin Farquhar Tupper s Poetical Works (24 February 1866)
Leigh Hunt s The Book of the Sonnet (5 April 1867)
John William De Forest s Miss Ravenel s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (4 June 1867)
John Conington s neid (29 June 1867)
The Late Henry Timrod (19 October 1867)
Charles Warren Stoddard s Poems (9 November 1867)
Putnam s Magazine (22 January 1870)
Part II: Civilization
A Critical Revolution and a Revolutionary Critic
David Moltke-Hansen
REVIEW ESSAYS
Fran ois Guizot, Democracy in France (April 1849)
Tuckerman s Essays and Essayists (July 1850)
Ellet s Women of the Revolution (July 1850)
The Southern Convention (September 1850)
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors gratefully acknowledge shared debts of gratitude to the Watson-Brown Foundation and to the University Libraries and the University South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina. These institutions have provided financial and logistical support for the Simms Initiatives, the wellspring of this volume. Alexander Moore, of the University of South Carolina Press, gave crucial guidance. Ehren Foley transcribed most of the Simms reviews in part 1 and all the review-essays in part 2. In addition he wrote the headnotes to the four review-essays of part 2. Todd Hagstette facilitated many aspects of the project with patience and collegiality.
Individual thanks from James E. Kibler, Jr., editor of part 1, and David Moltke-Hansen, editor of part 2, follow.
Part 1: Literature
Edd Winfield Parks s Simms as Literary Critic provided a solid foundation. It is fitting that William Gilmore Simms s Selected Reviews was collected exactly half a century after the 1961 publication of this volume. The Letters of William Gilmore Simms pointed to still other essays. Simms himself collected two thick volumes of his Reviews and Criticisms, passed down through his daughter Augusta and now in the South Caroliniana Library. These have proven indispensable in establishing the canon. For Simms s many reviews in the Charleston Mercury during the 1850s, masters theses by Nancy Pantusa and Fred Greer, completed at the University of Georgia in 1975 and 1991, respectively, provided valuable assistance. In addition Greer gave me copies of the forty issues of Simms s Mercury book-review column, Our Literary Docket.
Patrick Scott, Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, in table talk throughout the summer of 2011, provided transatlantic context and information on English Victorians. How surprising to bring up in conversation a minor figure, only to have Scott report he had written essays on the subject. Such support can be found in the true community of scholars, which I experienced in 2011 when I was the Simms Research Professor. These included the South Caroliniana Library s staff: Allen Stokes, Graham Duncan, Brian Cuthrell, Lorrey McClure, John Heiting, and Henry Fulmer. Dean Thomas F. McNally and his staff at the Thomas Cooper Library provided office space and technical assistance. The dean s kindness was of particular personal significance, given that I recollected first entering the new undergraduate library (now part of the Thomas Cooper Library) as a freshman half a century before. The building was only two years old at the time. All the books were on open shelves and could be seen through the glass shell of the building, brightly lit at night. I had never seen so many books and had great respect for where they were housed. I still do. This respect extends to those who keep them.
Simms s great granddaughter Mary Simms Furman provided a sterling example and many kindnesses. Her mother, Mary C. Simms Oliphant, was my early encourager in Simms studies. She showed me unsurpassed hospitality at her home in Greenville and gave me the free run of the remnants of Simms s library there. I also recall many instances in which she shared her wisdom about Simms, gleaned from more than sixty years of hard scholarly endeavor. She said many times that the best way to know her grandfather was