The Dalhousie Review is a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 literary magazine, founded in 1921 and associated with Dalhousie University

Dalhousie University

Dalhousie University is a public research university located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university comprises eleven faculties including Schulich School of Law and Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine. It also includes the faculties of architecture, planning and engineering located at...

. It publishes three times a year, in the spring, summer, and fall. Content includes fiction, poetry, literary essays and book reviews.

History

The Review was founded by Herbert L. Stewart, professor of philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at Dalhousie University, and the journal has been in continuous operation since then. Stewart edited The Dalhousie Review for twenty-six years, until January 1947. The review began with a strong Atlantic Canadian focus, printing philosophical articles and literary criticism alongside articles of interest to Halifax and the Atlantic region.

Since its inception, the Review has been receptive to diversity: to the work of political thinkers, historians, literary scholars, poets, and writers of fiction. Contributors during the magazine's early years included Archibald MacMechan

Archibald MacMechan

Archibald McKellar MacMechan FRSC was a Canadian academic at Dalhousie University and writer. His works deal mainly with Nova Scotia and its history. The Halifax Disaster was an official history of the Halifax Explosion.Born in Kitchener, Ontario, he is credited with reviving Hermann Melville's...

, R. MacGregor Dawson

Robert MacGregor Dawson

Robert MacGregor Dawson was a Canadian political scientist and academic. He is best known as the author of the 1947 textbook, The Government of Canada....

, Sir Robert Borden

Robert Borden

Sir Robert Laird Borden, PC, GCMG, KC was a Canadian lawyer and politician. He served as the eighth Prime Minister of Canada from October 10, 1911 to July 10, 1920, and was the third Nova Scotian to hold this office...

, Duncan Campbell Scott

Duncan Campbell Scott

Duncan Campbell Scott was a Canadian poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets....

, Eliza Ritchie, E. J. Pratt

E. J. Pratt

Edwin John Dove Pratt, FRSC , who published as E. J. Pratt, was "the leading Canadian poet of his time." He was a Canadian poet originally from Newfoundland who lived most of his life in Toronto, Ontario...

, Douglas Bush, Charles G. D. Roberts, Frederick Philip Grove

Frederick Philip Grove

Frederick Philip Grove was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, West Prussia, German Empire . He was best known as a prolific translator before he left Berlin for start a new life in North America in late July 1909...

, Robert Stanfield

Robert Stanfield

Robert Lorne Stanfield, PC, QC was the 17th Premier of Nova Scotia and leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He is sometimes referred to as "the greatest prime minister Canada never had", and earned the nickname "Honest Bob"...

, Hugh MacLennan

Hugh MacLennan

John Hugh MacLennan, CC, CQ was a Canadian author and professor of English at McGill University. He won five Governor General's Awards and a Royal Bank Award.-Family and childhood:...

, Hilda Neatby

Hilda Neatby

Hilda Marion Ada Neatby, was a Canadian historian and educator.Born in Surrey, England, the daughter of Andrew Mossforth Neatby and Ada Deborah Fisher, she received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota...

, Eugene Forsey

Eugene Forsey

Eugene Alfred Forsey, served in the Canadian Senate from 1970 to 1979. He was considered to be one of Canada's foremost constitutional experts.- Biography :...

, Thomas Raddall, Earle Birney

Earle Birney

Earle Alfred Birney, OC, FRSC was a distinguished Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for his poetry.-Life:...

 and A.J.M. Smith.

In the fifty-year period following Stewart's resignation (1947-97), The Dalhousie Review went through a variety of transformations in editorial emphasis and visual design, but without ever abandoning the direction chosen by its first editor. One of the more significant changes was the practice, adopted in the 1950s, of printing works of short fiction alongside discursive articles and poetry). Contributors of articles and reviews during the later period include Norman Ward, Peter Waite

Peter Busby Waite

Peter Busby Waite, is a Canadian historian, and a retired Dalhousie University professor.Born in Toronto, Ontario, he attended high school in Saint John, New Brunswick. He obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD degree from the University of Toronto...

, George Woodcock

George Woodcock

George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet, and published several volumes of travel writing. He founded in 1959 the journal Canadian Literature, the first academic journal specifically...

, Mavor Moore

Mavor Moore

James Mavor Moore, CC, OBC was a Canadian writer, producer, actor, public servant, critic, and educator.-Biography:...

, J.M.S. Tompkins, Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic.Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a 1st class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became the book Poetic...

, Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe popularly known as Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic...

, Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...

, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

, James Doull

James Doull

James Alexander Doull was a Canadian philosopher and academic who was born and lived most of his life in Nova Scotia. His father was the politician, jurist, and historian John Doull. From the late 1940s until the mid 1980s he taught in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax...

, Juliet McMaster, Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century...

, Peter Schwenger, John Fekete, and Daniel Woolf.

This list includes distinguished contributors from Great Britain (Barfield and Tompkins), Africa (Achebe and Gordimer), and the United States (Sellars)--a sign of the increasing globalization of intellectual culture during the period in question. During the same period The Review published creative work by well-known poets (Miriam Waddington

Miriam Waddington

Miriam Waddington was a Canadian poet, short story writer and translator.Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she studied English at the University of Toronto and social work the University of Pennsylvania . She worked for many years as a social worker in Montreal...

 and Alden Nowlan

Alden Nowlan

Alden Albert Nowlan was a critically acclaimed Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright-History:Alden Nowlan was born into rural poverty in Stanley, Nova Scotia, adjacent to Mosherville, and close to the small town of Windsor, Nova Scotia, along a stretch of dirt road that he would later refer to...

) and award-winning fiction writers (Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry

Clarence Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist who was best known for his novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.-Biography:...

 and Guy Vanderhaeghe

Guy Vanderhaeghe

Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe, OC, SOM is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, best known for his two Western novels, The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing, set in the 19th century American and Canadian West...

) as well as work by many new and less celebrated creative writers.

Today academic articles and book reviews comprise about one quarter of an issue's content. Fiction and poetry comprise the other three quarters, roughly, and the journal no longer has a Halifax or Atlantic Canadian focus.

External links

• DalhousieReview.dal.ca – official website