Circus in the Attic Summary
Warren's most obvious theme is Bolton Lovehart's struggle against the constricting force of his mother's love, and his inability to liberate himself from his attachment to his mother and Bardsville.
This theme is developed in a number of actions which demonstrate Bolton's futile rebellion.
First, there are Lovehart's youthful attempts to break away from home and the power of Mrs. Lovehart. As a twelve year old, he forgets about belonging to the Episcopal church, wanders into a Baptist revival and is baptized in the nearby creek water. But his mother immediately rejects his action. Later as a youth of sixteen, he makes his abortive attempt to run away and join the circus, only to be betrayed by the circus manager and returned to his father. We are told that the flight to the circus, unlike the baptism, was "carefully planned, not undertaken on impulse," but as a revolt...
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Study Pack
The Circus in the Attic Study Pack contains:
Circus in the Attic Short Guide
Robert Penn Warren Biographies (6)
742 words, approx. 3 pages
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American man of letters, was dedicated to art as a way of exploring the meaning of contemporary existence.Writer and poet Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Gut...
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Warren has spent his entire professional career associated with institutions of higher education. After graduation from Oxford, he joined the faculty, as an assistant professor, at Southwestern Colleg...
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Until recent years, the popularity of Robert Penn Warren's fiction, crowned by the ascendancy of All the King's Men (1946) to the status of a classic, has somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. ...
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The importance of Robert Penn Warren has made itself felt in almost equal measure in American literary criticism, poetry, and fiction. Expounding a home-grown New Criticism, Warren and Cleanth Brook...
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[This entry was updated by Victor Strandberg (Duke University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, of the entries by him in DLB 48: American Poets, 1880...
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14,771 words, approx. 50 pages
Biography EssayRobert Penn Warren's reputation as one of the most versatile and talented of America's men of letters has grown steadily since the publication of his first work in 1929. Although he ach...
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