The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, helped to transform the practice of reviewing in Britain. From its inception, the Edinburgh offered substantial essays on works being reviewed, often incorporating general reflections on the author or subject in question. Such leisurely analyses contrasted sharply with the more usual practice of the established reviews of the day, which tended to notice a larger number and wider range of books, generally in brief articles padded with substantial quotations. The Edinburgh Review, in contrast, set out with a decidedly less populist agenda; its goal, as it explained in its first number, was to identify and pay serious attention only to works that it considered to be of solid intell

This article in full comprises 1520 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

Published 24 January 2005

Citation: Perkins, Pam. "Edinburgh Review, The". The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 January 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=311, accessed 9 February 2010.]