Richard Chase (1914-1962) was a literary critic and a Professor of English at Columbia University. He is known for his work The American Novel and Its Tradition.
Nonfiction
Summer 1956
Cable and His “Grandissimes”
George Washington Cable is remembered, if at all, as a local colorist who wrote quaint, pathetic, and humorous tales about Creole life in Louisiana, and who sometimes gave his characters […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1952
A Novel Is a Novel
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Random House. $3.50 Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles. Random House. $3.50 At one point in Mr. Paul Bowles’s new novel, the hero basks […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1951
Sense and Sensibility
The Morning Watch by James Agee. Houghton Mifflin. $2.75. James Agee’s novelette is an ambitious one. It makes large demands on the short fictional form and on language. It achieves […]
My Credo: A Symposium of Critics
Autumn 1950
III. Art, Nature, Politics
I derive no doctrines about literature, or about anything else, from within literature itself, beyond the most conventional ideas of grammar, syntax, and style. My literary principles I mostly derive […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1950
Another Harpoon
The Enchafed Flood by W. H. Auden. Random House. $2.75 Mr. Auden derives his “romantic iconography of the sea” from a passage in Wordsworth’s Prelude. The passage (which nowadays must […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1949
The Fictions of Aborigines
Winnebago Hero Cycle: A Study in Aboriginal Literature by Paul Radin. Memoir I of the International Journal of Linguistics. Bloomington, Indiana. $2.00 This very interesting volume presents four of the […]
The Critic's Business: By Four of the Critics
Winter 1949
New vs. Ordealist
If Mr. Ransom is right in saying that just now the New Criticism is being underestimated or sold short, it is time to see that this may be caused by […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1949
Melville’s Confidence Man
If any one work of Melville’s has been misunderstood and neglected more than the others, it is The Confidence Man (1857). Usually considered a work of chaotic pessimism, it is […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1948
The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner’s “Light in August”
Without ado I wish to direct attention to the symbolic texture of Light in August. This texture is very much a matter of mechanics and dynamics—a poetry of physics. Repeatedly […]
A Comunication
Winter 1948
Radin on Toynbee
Sirs, The attack of one section of the liberal left upon Toynbee could be discerned even before it was launched. The first such attack I saw was a review by […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1947
The Brontës: A Centennial Observance (Reconsiderations VIII)
When Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights appeared in 1847, they were widely denounced as coarse, immoral, and subversive. Later Mrs. Humphrey Ward and the Bronte Society came to cherish the […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1945
The Sense of the Present
It is proof of our respect for a critic that he sometimes forces us to disagree with him. We can even admire him most and learn most from him, if […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
Art, Nature, Politics
From The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1950, Vol. XII, No. 4 I derive no doctrines about literature, or about anything else, from within literature itself, beyond the most conventional ideas of […]