Research Notes on my All the King's Men Project

My research thus far has taken me all over the map: From whiteness in Southern culture, to gender studies in Southern Literature, to ideas about Masculinity/Manhood in America, I’ve tried ground my project in a more current framework of gender and gender performance.  Surprisingly, only one major book-length work I’ve encounter has been devoted entirely to a feminist reading of All the Kings Men—Sleeping With the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren, by Lucy Ferriss.  There are other anthologized essay collections like The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren that contain essay’s like “Medusa, Movies, and All the King’s Men” (Deborah Wilson) that make explicit connections between the book’s narration and the film noir of the 20’s-40’s, but this focuses on female representations in the book.  Not many, it seems, have focused on Masculinity and issues of Homosociability in AKM.  This is exciting for me, because it allows me the opportunity to combine a critical reading of the text (my favorite) under various critical and cultural lenses.           

            Typically, the scholarship as it exists does examine Burden’s various vicarious paternal relationships, but always in terms of his metaphysics and Stark’s—narrated—teleology.  Accordingly, it will be interesting to take this conversation “out of the columns and into the colored lights” of gender performance. I've done various searches under the terms of Masculinity in Southern Literature, Gender Crisis in Southern Literature, Masculinity and Fascism, Gender Performance, Masculinity in America, each providing decent yields in various, useful secondary sources.  Over the past few days, it's been nice to see how these various concepts have combined to recast or intensify my initial reading of AKM.  New connections come to me all the time and it will be interesting to see how I can organize and relay these multiplying insights.