Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism PDF Author: John Burt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300157024
Category : Idealism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism PDF Author: John Burt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300157024
Category : Idealism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination

Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination PDF Author: Hugh Ruppersburg
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820312156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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The myth of America--the gap between American ideals and the actualities of American life--is a central and controlling metaphor in the works of Robert Penn Warren. Ranging across Warren's distinguished sixty-five year career, Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination identifies the concerns that stem from Warren's vision of American history as a struggle to restore the lost ideals of the founding fathers and shows how they resonate through his writings. From his 1928 biography of the abolitionist John Brown to the late poems of Altitudes and Extensions, Warren returned again and again to themes related to democracy, regionalism, personal liberties, individual responsibilities, minority relations, and above all the loss of ideals. Ruppersburg initially focuses on Warren's expression of these themes in three major narrative poems: Brother to the Dragons portrays slavery in all its horror and its consequences for Jeffersonian idealism; Audubon: A Vision extols the power of imagination in one man's quest to assert an American identity in the wilderness; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce regards the victimization of Native Americans and their exclusion from traditional versions of American history as evidence of flaws in the founding vision. In his nonfiction works Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren depicted the civil rights movement as a struggle for identity and individualism. Ruppersburg traces the development of Warren's attitudes, arguing that his support of the civil rights movement paradoxically stemmed from agrarianism, which by the 1950s meant something very different to him from the agrarianism of I'll Take My Stand. In addition, Warren hoped that the civil rights movement would restore some of the nation's original revolutionary ardor and idealism. The book closes with an examination of Warren's views on the future of democracy and the individual in a world dominated--and threatened--by science and technology. Looking particularly at The Legacy of the Civil War, Democracy and Poetry, and the poem "New Dawn," Ruppersburg concludes that Warren was skeptical about our prospects for survival. Still, through his advocacy of the arts and the primacy of the individual, Warren affirmed the values that he believed would help Western culture to endure. Robert Penn Warren sought to explore the meaning of the American experience, to validate the promise and the dangers of American ideals, and to urge the nation to take stock of itself and struggle for control of its fate in history. Through this obsessive search for America's identity, Ruppersburg demonstrates, Warren affirmed his own position as one of the most accomplished and significant of modern American writers.

The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren

The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: William Bedford Clark
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813193613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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In 1976—the bicentennial year—Robert Penn Warren told Bill Moyers that he was "in love with America" but his love for the nation was more often than not troubled and angry. Warren once remarked that "any intelligent person is inclined to criticize his country more strongly than he will criticize anything else. And he should It's a way of criticizing himself, too.... Trying to live more intelligently, and more fully." In The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren, a noted Warren scholar traces the evolution of our first poet laureate's distinctive stance toward the American experiment in democracy, showing how Warren sought to balance off the claims of self and society in the New World. This book surveys the full six decades of Warren's career, combining close reading with a historian's eye for social and political context. While pointedly avoiding the reductive pitfalls of the "new historicism," Clark documents the informing role the Great Depression played in shaping Warren's attitudes toward art and politics, and he demonstrates the necessity of regarding Warren's major achievements in fiction and verse as forms of "public speech." Read in this light, Warren's vision offers a set of possibilities for renegotiating America's covenant with its Founders on new and pragmatic terms. Based solidly on the best previous commentary on Warren and his work, Clark's study represents a new approach to its subject and incorporates insights and information garnered from the Warren Papers at Yale. A wide-ranging account of the interplay between an author's imagination and contemporary history, this book should prove of interest to all students of American culture, especially those concerned with the interrelationships of literature, politics, and ideology. Written in a lively and direct style, it will appeal to specialists and general readers alike.

Understanding Robert Penn Warren

Understanding Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: James A. Grimshaw
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570033957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Grimshaw examines the writer's views about the primacy of self-knowledge and explores the painful and arduous path his protagonists must follow to gain such knowledge and the interrelationship of his artistic endeavors, which were woven together by common thematic concerns - history, time, truth, responsibility, love, hope, and endurance.".

Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality

Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality PDF Author: Robert Steven Koppelman
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826209962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
As a man who disclaimed any kind of religious orthodoxy, Robert Penn Warren nonetheless found in Christianity "the deepest and widest metaphor for life." The significance he drew from it was one he expressed strictly in humanistic and natural terms: spiritual renewal and redemption were possible through engagement with literature and participation in the world. In Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality, Robert Koppelman explores the spiritual or religious dimension to Warren's work in light of his admitted agnosticism. Beginning with an overview of Warren's career as a Fugitive at Vanderbilt and then, later, as a formidable New Critic, Koppelman argues that Warren's regard for the spiritual aesthetic of both literary language and form can be traced to his early study of poetic metaphor. To illustrate Warren's mature vision, Koppelman centers his study on two novels and two poetry collections: All the King's Men, A Place to Come To, Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. He also examines the critical studies that concentrate on Warren's vision of time, history, and spiritual fulfillment, as well as those essays by Warren that complement his poems and novels in such a way as to elicit the reader's participation in the redemption of their narrators. Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality renews Warren's commitment to experiencing both literature and life as opportunities to participate in a realm of beauty and vision that is still open to contemporary readers.

Sleeping With the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren

Sleeping With the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: Ferriss, Lucy
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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A Disturbing and Alien Memory

A Disturbing and Alien Memory PDF Author: Douglas L. Mitchell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807134863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as the study of history shifted from the domain of letters into the social sciences, novelists in the North and the West generally turned away from writing history. Many southern novelists and poets, however, continued to undertake historical writing as an extension of their art form. What made southern literary figures differ from their northern and western counterparts? In A Disturbing and Alien Memory, Douglas L. Mitchell addresses this intriguing question by tracing a line of southern writers from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, finding that an obsessive need to defend the South and the oft-noted "rage to explain" drove some creative writers to continue to make forays into history and biography in an effort to enter a more public sphere where they could more decisively influence interpretations of the past. In the Romantic history of the nineteenth century, Mitchell explains, men of letters saw themselves as keepers of memory whose renderings of the past could help shape the future of the nation. He explores the historical writing of William Gilmore Simms to trace the failure of Romantic nationalism in the growing split between North and South, then turns to Thomas Nelson Page's effort to resurrect the South as a "spiritual nation" with a redeemed history after the Civil War. Mitchell juxtaposes their work with that of William Wells Brown, the pioneering African American historian and novelist who used the authority of history to write blacks into the American story. Moving into the twentieth century, Mitchell analyzes the historical component of the Southern Agrarian project, focusing on the tension between modernist aesthetics and polemical aims in Allen Tate's Civil War biographies. He then traces a path toward a viable historical vision, Robert Penn Warren's recovery of a tragic understanding, and the creation of a compelling historical art in the work of Shelby Foote. Throughout, Mitchell examines the peculiar dilemma of southern writers, the changing nature of history and its relation to the realm of letters, and the question of public authority, shedding light on several neglected texts in the process -- including Simms's The Sack and Destruction of Columbia, S.C., Brown's The Negro in the American Rebellion, Tate's Jefferson Davis, and Warren's John Brown. Offering a new perspective on a perennial debate in southern letters, A Disturbing and Alien Memory provides a critical framework for a neglected genre in the southern literary canon.

The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story

The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story PDF Author: Blanche H. Gelfant
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231504950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 677

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Book Description
Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as "Working Class Stories" or "Gay and Lesbian Stories." The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.

The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren

The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: David Madden
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Robert Penn Warren was unique among twentieth-century American writers for having achieved excellence in a broad and assorted range of genres: poems, novels, plays, critical works, historical essays, personal essays, biography, and innovative textbooks. In this collection of essays, critics and poets -- among the finest Warren scholars -- assess Warren's legacy within his various genres and illuminate his centrality to twentieth-century American culture. Although Warren was best known for his novel All the King's Men, the fact that most of these essays focus on his poetry attests to the urgency these poets and scholars feel about the need to call attention to this relatively neglected aspect of his work. Although their approaches and themes are varied, the pieces in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren are united in their assertion that the writer's true legacy is that he was, in a century of increasing specialization, a myriad-minded Renaissance man.

The Blood-Marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren's Later Novels

The Blood-Marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren's Later Novels PDF Author: Leonard Casper
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141472
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description