William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization

"Finely edited and handsomely produced, this important collection of hard-to-find reviews by the antebellum South's leading man of letters will benefit anyone interested in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century America. For those interested in southern literary culture, this volume confirms Simms's reputation as a prominent intellectual. But as this valuable collection demonstrates beyond any doubt, Simms also played a key role in the broader transatlantic debates over romanticism, publishing reviews of work by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Dickens, and many other leading authors."—Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-century South

"William Gilmore Simms ventured many genres (the novel, the romance, poetry, history, biography), but may have been best at criticism. By making accessible his judgments, both trenchant and wayward, Kibler and Moltke-Hansen have rendered a service to those wishing to understand American literary criticism and Southern ideas."—Michael O'Brien, University of Cambridge

"While William Gilmore Simms has always been known primarily for his fiction, famous especially for historical novels set in the era of the American Revolution, he was in his own day a leading man of letters, editor, critic, essayist. His reviews and critical essays collected here show a remarkable range of interest and expertise, and his opinions stand the test of time. A welcome volume."—Robert Morgan, author of The Road From Gap Creek

"The 'southern values' that heated the cultural wars of antebellum America and would erupt in Civil War receive no more careful articulation than in the literary commentaries and cultural essays of the South's foremost public intellectual, William Gilmore Simms. The most trenchant of these have been collected in William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization edited by James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke Hansen."—David S. Shields, McClintock Professor, University of South Carolina

"While working on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville famously noted that 'there are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.' As this terrific round-up of his criticism reveals, William Gilmore Simms was one of the few who were very much awake (even if he did find Moby-Dick 'sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous'). For all that has been written on Simms, we may have the fullest sense of his intellectual commitments here in the cut-and-thrust world of America's nascent literary criticism."—Stephen Berry, Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era, Department of History, University of Georgia