"""Accent"" 1940-1960: The history of a little magazine"
Hendricks, Fredric Jefferson
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/69437
Description
Title
"""Accent"" 1940-1960: The history of a little magazine"
Author(s)
Hendricks, Fredric Jefferson
Issue Date
1984
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, American
Abstract
Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature was founded in Urbana, Illinois, in 1940 by Kerker Quinn, a graduate student in the English department at the University of Illinois. It appeared regularly from 1940 to 1960, eventually numbering eighty issues. Consciously avoiding any one particular literary or political stance, Accent offered an eclectic range of poetry, fiction, and criticism.
Accent published works by most of the major American writers of this period. Some were already well-known like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, and R. P. Blackmur. Others, like Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, were just beginning their careers when they appeared in the magazine. But Accent's major achievement was its ability to locate talented, unpublished writers. Some of the writers that published first in Accent were Flannery O'Connor, William Gass, J. F. Powers, William Humphrey, Daniel Curley, Howard Moss, and Grace Paley.
This study is structured along chronological and generic lines. Chapter One focuses on Quinn's educational and intellectual background, relating his experience with his first little magazine, Direction. Chapter Two examines Accent's business history and its editorial policy. Chapter Three analyzes the criticism published in Accent and charts the evolution from a social criticism in the early Forties to the formalism espoused by the New Criticism during the Fifties. Chapter Four provides both an overview of the types of writing preferred by Accent and specific episodes in the magazine's relationship with particular writers. This chapter concludes that Accent's greatest contribution was ultimately the way it functioned as a responsive and sustaining audience which so many of its contributors seemed to need and appreciate.
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