Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hope From Hopelessness: Finding Contemporary Southern Literature Through Anne Tyler’S Use Of The Sound And The Fury, Amy M. Elliott

Amy M. Elliott

Critical debate focuses on the trend of Southern writers and the classification of their work within the tradition of Southern literature. One side of the argument supports contemporary writers as part of the Southern literary tradition. That is, it proposes that contemporary Southern writers continue to write Southern literature not by writing with the same style and magnitude as Faulkner and Warren, but by basing their writing on this tradition and modernizing it. An excellent example lies in Anne Tyler’s use of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a foundation for her Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Through …

The Associative Style In Warren And Ashbery, John Burt

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren and John Ashbery write out of different backgrounds and quite often appeal to different audiences, but each is a master of the "associative style." A comparative look at both poets is highly instructive and serves to deepen our appreciation of their art.

Philosophers, Fools, And Kings: Notes On The Brothers Karamazov And All The King's Men, C. Jason Smith

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A comparative analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov (1879-80) and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) based on the analysis of archetypal characters found in the work of both authors. The Philosophers, whose world-view is based in post-enlightenment reason, operate in a dialectical relationship with the Fools who interact with the world through faith. Culturally, the resolution of the dialectic between reason and faith yields the synthesis of the King who embodies reason and faith, the temporal and the eternal, in his position of god-given power. However, both Dostoyevsky and Warren actively reject the social imperative towards …

“An Exciting Spiral”: Robert Penn Warren On Race And Community, Steven D. Ealy

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Warren's contribution to I'll Take My Stand, "The Briar Patch," has been the subject of controversy from its beginning when Donald Davidson tried to exclude it from the collection on the grounds that it was too progressive. Later in life, Warren distanced himself from it by characterizing it as a defense of segregation. However, a closer reading of "The Briar Patch" reveals that Warren set such a high standard for "separate but equal" that he ultimately undermines that doctrine and prepares the way for his re-examination in Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro?

From Fox To Hedgehog: Warrens All The King's Men As A Gloss On Tolstoys View Of History, Polly Detels

Robert Penn Warren Studies

This essay explores Warren's All the King's Men as a figurative gloss on the discussion of human freedom and responsibility appearing in Leo Tolstoy's second epilogue to War and Peace. Isaiah Berlin's 1953 work on Tolstoy, The Fox and the Hedgehog, provides a theoretical framework for this analysis.

"Tough Talk In The Big Easy": Warrens Use Of History And Styron 'S The Confessions Of Nat Turner, John K. Crane

Robert Penn Warren Studies

On a 1968 panel, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and William Styron discussed the use of historical fact in fiction. The audience vociferously held Warren's use in All the King's Men more valid than Styron's in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Two analogies with recent films seem to support that contention.

Le Silence Du Bonheur And The House Of Forgiveness: Space And Silence In Flood, Aimee Berger

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Katrin Meise reformulates Wittgenstein's famous dictum-"What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence"-in a way that is particularly germane to a reading of Warren's novel Flood: ''What we pass over in silence, we must speak about." Warren establishes a complex aesthetic that incorporates silence into the circuit of discourse, forcing characters to confront the limitations of language, even as they realize the redemptive power of telling a "true" story.

Title Page (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

From Gent To Gentil: Jed Tewksbury And The Function Of Literary Allusion In A Place To Come To, Bill Mccarron, Paul Knoke

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A Latin aficionado, medieval scholar, and college professor, protagonist Tewksbury struggles emotionally to sort through his often sordid past. In the process, his allusions to a French chante fable, Virgil's Aeneid, and Dante's Divine Comedy illuminate both his sinning and his awakening to the power of redemptive love.

Working In The Theater With Robert Penn Warren, Aaron Frankel

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A major figure in the making of the contemporary American theater reminisces about his collaborations with Robert Penn Warren, documenting their relationship with previously unpublished correspondence and suggesting that Warren, had he written more for the stage, might well have had a shaping influence on the evolution of modem drama.

The Text Of The "Restored" Edition Of All The King's Men, Noel Polk

Robert Penn Warren Studies

All the King's Men appeared in 1946 in a text that had been changed in hundreds of ways by Harcourt editors; cumulatively these editorial interventions changed the novel in serious ways, mostly in changing the character of the narrator, Jack Burden, and his relationship to the events he narrates. The "restored" edition, published in 2001, indeed restores Warren's original text wherever it was possible, and so makes available a text much closer to what Warren had written initially. This essay offers a general explanation of the differences between the two versions of All the King's Men, a detailed listing of …

Contents (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editors' Foreward (Volume 2), William Bedford Clark, James A. Grimshaw Jr.

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Birthplace (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Center (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Circle (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Notes On Contributors (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …

Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

Bookshelf

Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

Clear-Cutting Eden: Representations Of Nature In Southern Fiction, 1930-1950, Christopher B. Rieger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how Southern literary representations of the natural world were influenced by, and influenced, the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, I examine the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four authors of this era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner; through their works, I investigate the intersections of race, class, and gender with the natural environment. I argue that during this time of profound regional and national upheaval there exists a climate of professed binary oppositions and that these authors’ representations of nature in …

Narrative Patterns Of Racism And Resistance In The Work Of William Faulkner, Janet Elizabeth Barnwell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Keeping in mind the complicated nature of race relations in the South during the segregation era, as well as the economic volatility of the time, and recognizing Faulkner's position as a white southern writer, this dissertation poses and attempts to answer a few specific questions regarding Faulkner's work. First, beginning with New Orleans Sketches and ending with Go Down, Moses, what texts seem most devoted to examining issues of race difference? Second, where in these texts does Faulkner most strikingly incorporate and then challenge racial stereotypes and cliches about the South? Third, working chronologically, how did Faulkner reconcile his position …

"Getting Above Your Raising" : The Role Of Social Class And Status In The Fiction Of Lee Smith, Sharon Elizabeth Colley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of social class and status in the fiction of contemporary novelist and short story writer, Lee Smith. As discussed in the Introduction, the study defines social class broadly, not limiting it to production, but also not discarding its economic underpinning. Max Weber's definition of class as "life chances" provides the starting point; any resources that can improve a person's position in the market place positively impact their "life chances." The resources appearing most often in Smith's fiction include economic capital and property, as well as education, family connections and occupational status. The discussion also builds …