The Times Literary Supplement

The Times Literary Supplement
Cniv1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Name	The Times Literary Supplement
Type	Weekly literary review
Format	Broadsheet
Publisher	Times Newspapers Ltd
Foundation	1902
Language	English
Headquarters	London
ISSN	0307-661X

The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London since 1902. It provides reviews, essays and cultural criticism covering literature, history, science and the arts. The periodical has engaged with figures across literature, politics and scholarship, influencing discourse in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.

History

The supplement began as a feature of The Times (London) during the reign of Edward VII and in the era of editors such as Charles Dickens's contemporaries and later Victorian cultural figures. Early contributors and subjects included commentators on the work of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and reviewers influenced by debates around Darwinism, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Across the twentieth century, the publication intersected with the careers of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and W. H. Auden, and covered events such as the First World War, the Second World War, the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. In the postwar era it reviewed work by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Philip Larkin and chronicled debates surrounding decolonisation involving figures associated with Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and institutions like the British Museum and the British Library. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century coverage extended to writers such as Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood and cultural conversations around events like the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iraq War, and scholarship from universities including Oxford University, University of Cambridge, Harvard University and Columbia University.

Editorial profile and content

The title is known for long-form criticism, essays on literature and interdisciplinary reviews that engage with the production and reception of books by figures such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, George Eliot and modernists including Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. It features reviews of fiction, poetry, drama, biography, history, philosophy and the sciences, citing scholarship from the British Academy, Royal Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and publishers such as Penguin Books, Faber and Faber, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Special issues and essays have examined movements and works linked to Romanticism, Modernism, Postcolonialism, Structuralism, and the influence of thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Edward Said. The review pages have been a forum for debate over translations of Homer, Dante Alighieri, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and contemporary translations of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Gustave Flaubert.

Contributors and notable editors

Over its history contributors have included critics, novelists, poets, historians and scholars such as Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, Christopher Ricks, John Bayley, Frank Kermode, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Roger Scruton, A. N. Wilson, Jane Smiley, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Robert Conquest, Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson, R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis and Monica Ali. Editors and editorial figures associated with the title have been active in literary networks connected to institutions like The Bodley Head, Chatto & Windus, Secker & Warburg, New Statesman and the London Review of Books. The paper has also published scholars from departments at University College London, King's College London, Princeton University, Yale University and Stanford University, as well as journalists from outlets including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Reception and influence

The publication has been praised and critiqued in cultural debates involving figures like E. M. Forster, C. P. Snow, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Its reviews have helped shape reputations for authors such as Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Philip Roth, and influenced prize culture around the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the National Book Award. Institutions such as the British Library and universities have archived and cited its reviews in scholarship on literary reception, while thinkers from Michel Foucault to Jürgen Habermas have been discussed within its pages. Critics have argued the paper reflects metropolitan London perspectives tied to publishing houses like Macmillan Publishers and cultural centres such as the Southbank Centre and British Council, while defenders point to its international reach across Europe, North America, Asia and the Commonwealth.

Circulation and publication details

Published weekly on paper and digitally, the title is produced by Times Newspapers Ltd with editorial operations based in London Borough of Westminster. Circulation has changed across print, online and institutional subscriptions, involving distribution through booksellers like Waterstones and libraries including the British Library. Institutional subscribers include universities such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh and research bodies like the Institute of Historical Research. The periodical maintains an archive consulted by researchers at King's College London, National Archives, Bodleian Library and international centres in New York City and Paris.

Category:British weekly newspapers