The Sewanee Review
I said I would be rambling on about magazines and it is fitting to start with a literary one that has been around a long time. Founded in 1892 it is “the longest-running literary quarterly in America.” In the fall it will publish its 500th edition. It issues from Sewanee which is more formally known as the University of the South which, by the way, is ten years older than Canada. It is fitting, as well, that the issue displayed has flowers on the cover since Sewanee is situated in a bucolic ‘Domain’ occupying 13,000 acres. Sewanee is about an hour from Chattanooga. If at this point you are humming “Old Folks at Home” you are thinking about the Suwannee River which begins in another state farther south.
My selection of this serial as the first in this series can be explained partially (perhaps even largely) by the fact that some of the work I was going to do has already been done. A new Yankee editor has been hired and he and the journal are the subjects of a recent article in The New York Times, making my job easier.
Although The Sewanee Review would have been described by some as “moribund” the new editor, Adam Ross, thought it “a magazine with some of the greatest DNA in the American literary ecosystem” and that it “seemed worth slowing my literary career down for.” Great writers have always been associated with the journal and Ross is bringing in some great new ones. The website has been made more robust and the subscription numbers now have four digits.
If you visit the site of The Sewanee Review you will find that $35 are required to breach the paywall. You can, however, sample some material from the archives where you will find pieces by such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor. You can also access the associated blog - The Conglomerate - and read for free some essays and interviews.
The article in The New York Times notes some other literary revivals and I will include the section here and strike these serials from those to be considered in future rambles.
“The Sewanee Review is one of a handful of pedigreed literary journals to be given a second life. The Evergreen Review, a journal founded in 1957 that published work by Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, John-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett, was reinstated online this year, with the novelist and critic Dale Peck as editor in chief. Granta, founded in 1889, was revived by Bill Buford in 1979 and now has an estimated readership of 37,000 an issue. And The Paris Review, whose future seemed uncertain after the death of its longtime editor George Plimpton, is thriving, with 20,000 paid print subscribers, up from just under 12,000 a decade ago, according to the review’s editor, Lorin Stein.”
Sources:
“New Life for a 125-Year-Old Literary Journal,” Alexandra Alter, The New York Times, June 4, 2017.
Locally (here in London) the London Public Library does not appear to have a subscription.
If you wander up to Western University you will find a complete run of The Sewanee Review from 1892. It appears that the last print issue is from 2007 and after that the electronic version is available on a few different platforms.
Bonus hint: JSTOR is a huge digital library accessible from many university libraries and The Sewanee Review is available in it. Individuals can also pay for access. BUT, if you go to the JSTOR site and search for the journal you will find that issues of The Sewanee Review BEFORE 1923 (and copyright concerns) can be read for free. Newer articles cost around $25 or you can pay a fee for access.
CANCON Considerations.
That is a joke; I don’t think unread blogs like this one are subject to Canadian content laws, but, if so, here you go:
Canadian poet William Wilfred Campbell is discussed in the Oct. 1900 issue and “Canadian Novels and Novelists” are covered in 1903. Both articles are by the Canadian Lawrence J. Burpee and both can be accessed for free.
If you want to read some fiction with a local Ontario setting you will have to pay since the piece was published in 1968. See: “The Coast of Erie,” by George Lanning in the Winter, 1968 issue.
P.S. In a recent post I discussed retiring and university towns. Have a look at the Sewanee site and see what you think. http://www.sewanee.edu/
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