Tag: literary criticism

Morse Peckham

826 words

Morse Peckham (1914-1993) was a literary critic and cultural historian who was very well-known during his lifetime but who has been largely forgotten today. He had all the qualities that make him anathema in today’s academia: Besides being white, brilliant, and a writer of enormous clarity and precision, Peckham was also a careful and insightful editor of nineteenth-century literary texts, a Darwinist, and a prescient observer of the decline of the American university.

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7,981 words

Colin Wilson
The Age of Defeat
London: Aristeia Press, 2018 (reprint; original edition 1959)

“You get to be a superhero by believing in the hero within you and summoning him or her forth by an act of will. Believing in yourself and your own potential is the first step to realizing that potential. (more…)

6,580 words

The following review was published in The European, a journal owned and published by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife, Diana, between 1953 and 1959, in its February 1957 issue. (more…)

3,820 words

Chuck Palahnuik
Adjustment Day: A Novel
London: Jonathan Cape, 2018

“Ears, gentlemen. Sandinista ears.”[1]

I had almost reached the massive iron door, hidden behind a construction dumpster, that serves as the entrance to the abandoned glove factory that has been my squat for the past several years (more…)

6,580 words

The following review was published in The European, a journal owned and published by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife, Diana, between 1953 and 1959, in its February 1957 issue. (more…)

1,845 words

H. P. Lovecraft
Supernatural Horror in Literature
Edited, annotated, and with a foreword by Alex Kurtagic
London: Wermod & Wermod, 2013

The origins of the modern “weird tale” lie in H. P. Lovecraft’s essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Not, of course, that there were not “weird” stories long before; Lovecraft himself traces them as far back as the Book of Enoch and various mediaeval works.[1]  (more…)

2,474 words

Editor’s Note:

The following text is the transcript by V.S. of the question and answer session following Jonathan Bowden’s lecture “T. S. Eliot” at the 34th New Right Meeting in London on Saturday, August 6, 2011. (more…)

T. S. Eliot, September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965

5,734 words

Part 2 of 2

Editor’s Note:

T. S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. In honor of his birthday, we are publishing this essay by Kerry Bolton, the second and final part of which appears below.

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Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of T. S. Eliot, 1938

5,352 words

Part 1 of 2

The First World War brought to a climax a cultural crisis in Western Civilization that had been developing for centuries: money overwhelmed tradition, as Spengler would have put it[1] (or, to resort to the language of Marx, the bourgeoisie supplanted the aristocracy).[2] Industrialization accentuated the process of commercialization, with its concomitant urbanization and the disruption of organic bonds and social cohesion. This has thrown societies into a state of perpetual flux, with culture reflecting that condition.

It was—and is—a problem of the primacy of Capital. (more…)

1,481 words

Joseph Epstein
In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage
Boston: Mariner Books, 2008

Poking about in the $1 bins at the Strand, I uncovered several copies of a recent book by Joseph Epstein, a collection of essays, In A Cardboard Belt! I recalled reading him in places like Commentary and The New Criterion, but since I haven’t found such outlets tolerable for years, he seems to have slipped from my radar screen. So, I took the plunge.

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