Southern Literary Messenger - Content

Content

The Southern Literary Messenger featured poems, fiction, non-fiction, translations, reviews, legal articles, and Virginia historical notes. Each issue carried the subtitle "Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts" or some variation of it. The periodical was published approximately monthly, and it initially had subscribed mostly readers in the north but it picked up southern readers and writers over time as more southerners wrote articles to be published, as is stated in an 1840 issue of the Messenger. James E. Heath, the first editor of the Southern Literary Messenger wrote:

From our Northern and Eastern friends we have received more complimentary notices than from any of our Southern brethren without the limits of our own State. We say this not in a reproachful spirit, but in a somewhat sad conviction of mind, that we who live on the sunny side of Mason and Dixon's line are not yet sufficiently inspired with a sense of importance of maintaining our just rights, or rather our proper representation in the Republic of Letters.

In February 1861, the Southern Literary Messenger defended the secession movement by publishing an article by William H. Holcombe, a doctor, entitled "The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South."

Read more about this topic:  Southern Literary Messenger

Famous quotes containing the word content:

    To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

    A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)

    Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)