Robert Penn Warren’s Night Rider and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time of Man through the Prism of History

Résumé En

Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881-1941) and Robert Penn Warren’s (1905-1989) fiction indisputably falls within a historical perspective. Indeed, Warren’s early life in Kentucky visibly influenced his work and Kentucky history is exemplified in Night Rider (1939). The novel focuses on the early twentieth century tobacco war and Warren draws his characters’ attributes from individuals in his Kentucky past. Set in a rural area in Washington County, Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time of Man (1926) traces the life of a poor itinerant sharecropper family desperately yearning for a better existence. The writer’s sensitive portrayal of local folks enduring a life of hardships recalls what life was like in her native Kentucky.This paper will explore the way both novels relate to Kentucky political, social and economic history and the underlying or blatant message emerging from those historical accounts. Besides, a stark portrayal of political movements or social conditions of the time sheds light on Warren’s and Roberts’ consideration of their regional consciousness engaged in reinventing their time and place. The paper will also discuss both writers’ common ground on the philosophical and metaphysical scope of that History imprint. As fiction manipulates history, the rearrangement of experience in an artful way aims at a quest for the truth.