The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren

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Ohio State University Press, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 288 pages
The stubborn silence of text passed down from fathers to their sons is examined in this study of Robert Penn Warren's fiction. In every case, that text - whether a letter, a poem, a handbill, or a wink - refuses to disclose what the son who reads it wants to know. This recurring scene, clearly inscribed in the plot of each of the novels, gives coherence to Warren's art and at the same time writes the reader into the story. We become the protagonist son, and the questions he asks are the ones we too want to ask. And to gain access to the text, we must learn to decipher what Warren calls the logic of dream.

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Contents

3
37
Willies Wink All the Kings Men 1946
60
Other Stories 1947
82
Copyright

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