Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom.

Next to where I type, I have tacked up the syllabi for two American literature courses taught in the 1980s at well-known, indeed prestigious, institutions in the United States—one in California, the other in Ohio. Both are survey courses, one called “The American Literary Imagination,” the other “Life and Thought in American Literature.” One covers, in a single semester, thirty-two writers, including Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Crowe Ransom, and Ezra Pound; all are white and male, except for one assignment on Emily Dickinson and one poem by Marianne Moore. The other, a two-term course, includes twenty-three white male writers and Emily Dickinson. I do not want to argue that today such courses have no right to exist, for that kind of statement would engage the significant issue of academic freedom. But such courses are simply not truthful, nor professionally current. The pictures they present to students of the American literary imagination or of American life and thought are woefully incomplete and inaccurate. In the profession of literary study they represent what, in Psychology, was represented by generalizations about moral development based on interviews with a sample of white, male, college sophomores and juniors; or in History, was represented by conclusions about the “expansion” of opportunity under Jacksonian democracy when, in fact, white women's opportunities and those of black people were largely contracting. Were such courses titled “American Literature from the Perspective of ‘'Diner’” (a film set in 1958), they might have accurately represented themselves. But now, over a quarter of a century later, a large new body of scholarship has transformed the intellectual base of our profession. To be responsive to this scholarship and to present an accurate picture of the development of the literary cultures of the United States, teaching has begun to change. A number of recent volumes record such change and offer means for encouraging its systematic development. The changes in our profession I am describing are rooted in the movements for racial justice and sex equity.

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Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1144-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stacy Kidd

Keyword(s):

Master's Degree ◽

University Of California ◽

Literary Texts ◽

New Criticism ◽

Robert Penn Warren ◽

Oxford University ◽

Allen Tate ◽

John Crowe Ransom ◽

The University ◽

Vanderbilt University

Robert Penn Warren was a renowned poet, novelist, critic and educator. He matriculated to Vanderbilt University in 1921, where, with Allen Tate (1899–1979) and John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), he became part of The Fugitives, a group of poets named for the journal they published. Warren earned a master’s degree at the University of California and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford University. Here, he began to pursue the close readings of literary texts that eventually became associated with New Criticism: a focus on the text itself without reference to the biography of the writer or the historical circumstances of the text’s composition or reception.

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Southern Agrarians

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1140-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jenny LeRoy

Keyword(s):

American South ◽

Industrial Capitalism ◽

The South ◽

Robert Penn Warren ◽

The American South ◽

John Crowe Ransom

The Southern Agrarians were twelve writers from the American South who advocated a return to an agrarian-based economy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In their 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and others attacked the system of modern industrial capitalism and its effect on the traditional way of Southern life.

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To John Crowe Ransom

College English ◽

10.2307/375639 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 32 (8) ◽

pp. 945

Keyword(s):

John Crowe Ransom

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Young, T. D. and Hindle, J. (eds), Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom. Pp. xi + 354. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. £28.50

Notes and Queries ◽

10.1093/notesj/33.2.278 ◽

1986 ◽

Keyword(s):

Baton Rouge ◽

State University ◽

Louisiana State University ◽

John Crowe Ransom

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The sound and the fury of Southern American literature

Estudos Germânicos ◽

10.17851/0101-837x.3.2.130-141 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 130

Author(s):

Ana Lúcia Almeida Gazolla

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

American Literature ◽

William Faulkner ◽

Richard Wright ◽

The United States ◽

Eudora Welty ◽

Carson Mccullers ◽

Robert Penn Warren ◽

Sound And The Fury ◽

John Crowe Ransom

The South of the United States presents, in the twentieth century, a remarkable flowering in the area of Literature. It has produced, especially in the first half of the century, more good writers than any other region in the country. Writers of the stature of Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Carson McCullers, to name just a few, together with William Faulkner, the greatest of all, have been responsible for a period of such creativity that it has come to be known as "the Southern Renaissance."

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