Through the agency of their press American universities are rapidly extending the field of their usefulness in the publication of valuable books and also in periodical work. In undertaking a new review, American Literature, the Duke University Press promises an interesting addition to the branch of magazine enterprise which includes such notable examples as The Yale Review and the University of Virginia Quarterly.

University press publications in the past have enabled the distribution of considerable material which otherwise might not have seen print and would have been lost to large circulation among scholars and general readers. The new project at Duke enters upon a fertile and comparatively little worked field. A journal, devoted solely to research in American letters can easily find its scope of service. The coming first number with its articles on Sydney Lanter, Bret Harte, Edgar Allan Poe reveals the type of work to be expected. An awakening of national self-consciousness in American literature in a movement disconnected from the Sherwood Anderson-Sinclair Lewis school will be welcomed as a distinct addition. With such academic recognition for the history of native writing as a start, a further progression may commence strengthening the position of American literature in the college curriculum where today it is often neglected.

The new project reaches light at a time closely connected with a general literary renaissance south of the Mason-Dixon Line. American Literature with its board of editors including national figures such as Bliss Perry, Norman Forester of North Carolina, and Stanley T. Williams of Yale promises to stimulate the southern literary rebirth as well as be itself enriched by membership in that movement.