American Literature Commons^™

"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.

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.

“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?

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

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

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

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

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theater reminisces about his collaborations with Robert Penn Warren, documenting their relationship with previously unpublished correspondence and suggesting that Warren, had he written more for the stage, might well have had a shaping influence on the evolution of modem drama.

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.

About The Center (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.

The Role Of Taoism In The Social Construction Of Identity In The Joy Luck Club, Rebekah Elizabeth Shultz

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Gilchrist, Ellen Louise, 1935-2024 (Sc 1336), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscript Small Collection 1336. Letter written to Kentucky author Ellen L. Gilchrist from Paula Quinn, WKU journalism professor, after a scheduled interview did not materialize. Gilchrist's response is handwritten on the letter. Includes newspaper clipping about Gilchrist's presentation at WKU, and Quinn's explanatory letters, 2001.

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

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Contents (Volume 2), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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 …

Abigail Scott Duniway, Debra Shein

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1895, as she launched a new journal dedicated to bringing equal rights to all the women of America, Abigail Scott Duniway had already been a key figure in the national woman’s movement for over two decades. And during those years, dramatic changes had been taking place. As she wrote, “though ‘Liberty for all the inhabitants of the land’ has not yet been secured, we have made much permanent progress, and now nobody doubts our ultimate success” (“Salutatory” PE 16 Aug. 1895). At the beginning of Duniway’s career, women’s rights were severely restricted. With few exceptions, marriage brought an end …

Testimony, Refuge, And The Sense Of Place: A Conversation With Terry Tempest Williams, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with Terry Tempest Williams is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Testimony, Landscape And The West: A Conversation With Stephen Trimble, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with Stephen Trimble is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Activism, Fly Fishing, And Fiction: A Conversation With David James Duncan, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with David James Duncan is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Allison Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1937) and Richard Ranus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick's name appeared on the title page of only one of her books published during her lifetime, her 1835 Tales and Sketches, a volume collecting pieces that had originally appeared in the annually published "gift books" in the preceding nine years. Sedgwick is the earliest writer included in Mary Kelley's influential book on women's authorship, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, and Kelley claims that women writers published anonymously or pseudonymously because of the great anxiety that appearing in public through the medium of print caused them: "The literary domestics could write and, as …

Frank Chin, John Charles Goshert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Born in Berkeley in 1940, Frank Chin lived in the Motherlode country of California’s Sierra foothills during the Second World War before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as an English major, but was drawn away to work for railroad companies throughout the west. Such early experiences of movement and transience would provide the foundations for the shifting settings of much of his drama, fiction, and criticism that would follow; additionally, this transience would also underlie the complex tone, treatment, and perception of Asian American identity that characterizes his work and …

William Kittredge, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Equally at home whether speaking before the Humanities Colloquium at Cedar City, Utah, the Nature Conservancy at Bend, Oregon, the Regional Newswriting Colloquium at Salt Lake City, or the Wyoming Outdoor Council at Sheridan, William (Bill) Kittredge has emerged over the past thirty years as one of the most prolific and outspoken exponents of the New West. He has edited or co-edited seven anthologies ranging in nature from Great Action Stories (1977) and Stories into Film (1979) to the monumental Montana compilation, The Last Best Place (1988) and The Portable Western Reader (1997). He is the author of two notable …

We Weren’T Always White: Race And Ethnicity In Italian/American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn

Masters Theses

In an interview about The Cider House Rules, John Irving states, "It is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel" (qtd. in Herel, para. 18). However, in book reviews, jacket blurbs, literary criticism, and Irving's own writing, readers and critics and Irving often assert that he is a neo-Victorian novelist, and the Victorians were a notoriously political bunch. Though Irving does not admit to the political nature of his writing, the way he treats feminist politics in his fiction has drawn particular notice by the media, who often label him as a feminist writer. …

Reading Louis L'Amour's Hondo, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.
—Louis L'Amour on his work (Jackson 168)

In 1946, publisher and editor Leo Margulies invited Louis L’Amour to a party in New York. Each of them had a problem. L’Amour, having served in the Army during World War II, had recently returned to the States to discover the pulp fiction markets in which he had established himself as a writer were changing. In the 1930s, he had sold numerous adventure, sports, and detective stories to magazines …

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …