The Sewanee Review

Contents

The Sewanee Review is a long-running American literary magazine founded in 1892 at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. It has published poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays by prominent figures such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, and has been associated with editors and contributors connected to institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Oxford University. Over its history the magazine has intersected with movements and debates involving figures like Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and John Crowe Ransom, reflecting networks that include The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), Partisan Review, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.

History

Founded in 1892 during the presidency of Lyman C. Draper-era regional growth, the magazine emerged amid cultural conversations involving the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and later the Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation, and the aftermath of World War I. Early issues featured contributors linked to Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia, situating the periodical within Southern intellectual networks tied to William Faulkner's milieu and the Southern Agrarians who associated with Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College. In the 20th century the magazine adapted through editorial changes that connected it to debates over modernism involving Marianne Moore, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and the polemics surrounding Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Postwar shifts saw interactions with figures from New Criticism circles including John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, and later with postwar poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney.

Editors have included Southern intellectuals and nationally prominent critics linked to institutions like Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College. Contributors span major poets, novelists, and critics — from Wallace Stevens and Robert Penn Warren to Ralph Waldo Emerson-era successors and later writers like James Agee, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and Maya Angelou. The magazine has published essays and reviews by critics associated with Harvard University and Columbia University such as Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis-influenced commentators, and scholars tied to the Modern Language Association and the intellectual circles of New Criticism. International contributors have included figures associated with Cambridge University, King's College London, and Trinity College Dublin such as W. B. Yeats-adjacent writers and later recipients of awards like the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Award.

The Sewanee Review has alternated between publishing poetry, short fiction, criticism, book reviews, and essays on aesthetics, often engaging with debates tied to Modernism, Postmodernism, and regionalist concerns like those debated by the Southern Agrarians and figures such as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. Its pages have hosted formal experiments by poets associated with Modernist poetry—including works resonant with Imagism proponents like Ezra Pound and H.D.—and narrative innovations from novelists connected to Southern literature traditions such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. The magazine's critical apparatus has discussed canonical texts including those by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce while also engaging scholarship around Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and contemporary writers like Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Margaret Atwood.

Published quarterly by The University of the South from its Sewanee, Tennessee campus, the magazine has maintained a print run and subscription model distributed across the United States, with institutional subscriptions held by libraries at Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and other research institutions. Single issues and back issues circulate through academic libraries associated with the Library of Congress cataloging systems and through literary archives that collect periodicals alongside holdings from presses such as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Knopf, HarperCollins, and university presses at Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. Circulation figures have varied across decades as the magazine navigated the transitions that affected print journals alongside counterparts like Poetry (magazine), The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

Critically, the magazine has been cited in scholarship tied to New Criticism, the study of Modernist literature, and Southern literary history, influencing anthologies and syllabi at universities including Columbia University, Duke University, University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins University. Reviews in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic have discussed its role in promoting poets and critics who later received Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature recognition. Its archival presence features in special collections at institutions such as Duke University Libraries, Yale Beinecke Library, and Princeton University Library, and its legacy is traced in histories of American letters alongside publications like Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United States