The Paris Review

Theparisreview.org is a website affiliated with the quarterly literary magazine The Paris Review. The magazine was founded in Paris by Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, but the website didn’t make its debut until 1995. Nadja Spiegelman is the current online editor, though content on the site taken from the magazine would have originally been under its own editor, Emily Nemens. The site, geared towards enticing the reader to purchase a subscription to the magazine, offers limited access to the archived content on the website. Despite this, an abundance of free content can be accessed by anyone.

The homepage of theparisreview.org contains a mix of both free content and previews of content behind a paywall, though a section titled “The Daily” consists of daily articles that are available for free. The Daily began on June 1st 2010 with a letter from the editor stating the purpose of the daily posts were to keep readers engaged in-between issues of The Paris Review. All posts on The Daily since its inception are accessible and cover vastly different topics, from an article praising Peanuts cartoons to a recounting of an attempt to recreate Italian dishes mentioned in the novel The Leopard.

The site also features submitted fiction, poetry, interviews, and art/photography. While access to all of these requires a subscription, one work is featured daily in each category and can be freely viewed. Podcasts featuring interviews with writers and readings of their works are available, though the podcast is still somewhat new with only two available seasons. A video section links to the organization’s YouTube channel, which offers a few dozen relatively short videos. The majority of these videos feature authors discussing their first publication.

Works Cited

The Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/. 2019.

Poets.org

Poets.org is a website created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit organization founded by Marie Bullock in 1934. It is funded in part by individual contributions and members, as well as government programs, private foundations, and corporations. Though Poets.org is run by President and Executive Director Jennifer Benka, a Board of Chancellors consults with the staff on creative matters and a Board of Directors oversees finances, programs, and plans for the future. While the Chancellors are exclusively poets, the Board of Directors consists of an eclectic collection of more executive occupations. The website offers a catalogue of poems, teaching materials, backgrounds on poets, local events, and literary job listings. The entirety of this information is available for free, unobstructed by advertisements, on their website.

Most prominently presented on the site is the poem-a-day service in which one may sign up and be emailed a selected poem everyday. The daily poem is displayed on the site’s homepage and includes a picture of the author along with a direct quote from them regarding the poem. The homepage also contains links to their collection of over 11,000 poems, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to poets such as Gary Jackson who are still writing to this day. Information on the authors of these archived works is easily accessible through their archive of over 3,000 poets, though the amount available can vary wildly from poet to poet depending on their perceived status or tenure as a writer. Joy Harjo, one of the aforementioned chancellors on the site, has several paragraphs listing her accolades while details on Ashley Toliver are limited to two sentences.

Poets.org also offers more practical content in the form of lesson plans and suggested poems for teachers as well as a consistently updated list of literary and arts jobs that may be of interest to English majors. Though the site does include “poetry near you” events, the vast majority of the events listed are located in more densely populated areas, especially New York. The Academy of American Poets subsection of the website, somewhat hidden at the bottom of the homepage, links to programs, prizes, and awards offered by the site’s governing organization.

Works Cited

Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 2019, https://poets.org/.

Studies in the Novel

Studies in the Novel is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal founded in 1969 by James W. Lee at the University of North Texas. It contains book reviews and essays over a plethora of topics and is not restricted to any period, subject, or genre of literature. The current Editor is Nora Gilbert and the editorial board consists of an even mix of male and female professors from various universities across America. Once a year a guest editor is brought on and an issue will feature a single author or topic. Essay subjects range from early science fiction, to the use of holy grail motifs in McCarthy’s The Road, to the CIA’s involvement in the film adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Early issues of Studies in the Novel (1969-1992) are available to TTU students in print at the Volpe Library and journals from 1994-present can be found online through the Proquest Central database.

Submissions to Studies in the Novel must be submitted online as a MS Word file adhering to MLA format consisting of around 6,000 to 9,000 words. Due to the scope of the journal, there are no restrictions on the submission’s subject or stance. Submitted articles are reviewed through the double-blind process after the editor-in-chief has deemed the article to be of sufficient quality. The acceptance rate for submitted articles ranges from approximately 10-13% while book reviews are commissioned by the journal and are almost universally accepted.

 

The content of articles remain, at their core, similar throughout the 50 years the journal has been in publication. They all approach a work of literature from a specific angle. While articles vary wildly in their chosen interpretation of a work, some books are featured several times throughout the years. This reevaluation makes sense when considering the change of culture that has occured since the early issues of the nascent journal’s inception fifty years ago. The following synopses will help to demonstrate both the journal’s broad spectrum of topics and eclectic sources while also highlighting how various interpretations of the same text are encouraged.We begin our look at this expansive journal with 1985’s Spring volume. “Parent-Child Tensions in Frankenstein: The Search for Communion” takes a look at how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a metaphor for abusive/negligent parents and how there is a subtle inference of familial discord within Victor Frankenstein’s family. This article is juxtaposed with “Faulkner’s blues”, a review-essay that delves into Faulkner’s love of the musical genre and how the themes and culture of the music influenced how he wrote his stories.

 

In the spring of 1999, Studies in the Novel featured diverse essays ranging from Mark Twain’s unfinished “Mysterious Stranger” story to the idea of conscience in Frankenstein. “Terrible dreams of creative power: The question of no. 44” takes a look at the multiple versions of an incomplete story Twain had worked on in his later years and is concerned with the character No. 44/Young Satan. “Frankenstein and the Reprobate’s Conscience” sees Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein not as a warning about scientific advancement, but as a novel dealing with “horrors raised out there in the world by a scientist recklessly driving to change the course of nature.” (Goodall 19).

The most recent volume of Studies in the Novel (Vol. 51, Iss. 3) contains another article about Frankenstein, “Frankenstein’s Ghosts”. While the previously mentioned articles were concerned with conscience and relationships within families, this article focuses on the use of ghosts in the narrative and how the tangible existence of an ethereal being allows the author to address “A contemporary anxiety produced by the scientific advances that she records” (Anderson 333). This issue also highlights how submissions have changed throughout the years. Topics and fears that were less relevant during the journal’s inception in 1969 are now prevalent. This can be seen with “Digital Screens and National Divides in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West” by Liliana Naydan. Naydan argues that Exit West is a warning about technology offering merely the façade of being connected while we are actually more separated than ever.

Studies in the Novel is a prestigious, ongoing journal that any English major will be able to find something of interest in. While canonized literature seems to take precedence, both lesser known novels from the past and more modern works are also featured.

Works CitedAnderson, Emily Hodgson. “Frankenstein’s Ghosts.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 51, no. 3, Oct. 2019, pp. 333-347., doi:10.1353/sdn.2019.0043

Claridge, Laura P. “Parent-child Tensions in Frankenstein: The Search for Communion.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 17, no. 1, Apr. 1985, pp. 14-26.

Goodall, Jane. “Frankenstein and the Reprobbate’s Conscience.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 31, no. 1, Apr. 1999, pp. 19-20.

Krause, David. “Faulkner’s Blues.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 17, no. 1, Apr. 1985, pp. 80-94.

Naydan, Liliana M. “Digital Screens and National Divides in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 51, no. 3, Oct. 2019, pp. 433-451., doi:10.1353/sdn.2019.0048

Royal, Derek Paarker. “Terrible Dreams of Creative Power: The Question of No. 44” Studies in the Novel, vol. 31, no. 1, Apr. 1999, pp. 44-59.