Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2000

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Dorothy M. Scura

Committee Members

Charles J. Maland, Mary E. Papke, Ted Hipple

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 novella “The Circus in the Attic” and his use there in of the circus trope establish a matrix for his fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism and align his canon with the selected works of several authors of the Southern Renaissance, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison. All of these authors observed the American circus in its heyday during the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, by the end of World War I, the process of the circus’s cultural rehabilitation had begun; its growing conservatism was manifested by its support of traditional American values during the 1920s, through the Great Depression, and finally through World War II years that correspond with the production of some of the greatest works of the Southern Renaissance. The circus’s growing conservatism was consistent with its use by writers of the Southern Renaissanceas an image for the mythic, patriarchal Old South and the cultural stagnation that results firom one’s allegiance to it, especially in light of moral imperatives to adapt to the New South. Robert Penn Warren’s canon is particularly driven and informed by the image of the circus. Readers encounter its most developed use in his novella “The Circus in the Attic,” although circus-related structures, themes, and characters from the novella also appear in Warren’s biographical studies, poetry. social commentary, and literary criticism.

Warren’s extensive use of the circus reveals an awareness of his complex personal relationships and creative goals, he is the child of the south who finds his future threatened by its historical legacy as well as the artist of the south whose clarity of vision threatens to alienate him from his region, he is an author whose artistic goals establish his affinity with the mainstream North even as they reveal his insights into the southern way of life, finally, he is a twentieth-century writer whose appropriation of the circus, an image that had already been claimed for different purposes by literary modernism, refines the image to affect his vision of southern modernism.

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