Bowling Green, Ky. - Author Constance W. Hassett will receive the 2005 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University.

Hassett, a professor of English at Fordham University in New York, was chosen for “Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style,” published in 2005 by the University of Virginia Press.

The award will be presented April 23 during the 19th annual Robert Penn Warren Celebration.

“The jury found that Hassett’s study of this Victorian poet exemplifies in superior fashion the ideal of close reading practiced by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks,” said Randolph Runyon, professor of French at Miami University of Ohio and member of the Warren Center Advisory Group.

“Hassett offers a brilliant, and belated, comprehensive reassessment of Rossetti’s poetic canon,” he said. “Her careful readings show us again and again that Rossetti’s ‘style is patient with itself, trusting its subtleties of manner to achieve resonance and allowing inexplicitness to do its evocative work.’”

Runyon added that Hassett “gently” corrects earlier assessments of the poet and “shows that Rossetti’s entire canon, including her children’s poetry and late devotional works, rewards serious attention and scrutiny.”

Mary Ellen Miller, coordinator of the Robert Penn Warren Center and professor of English at WKU, said the award, which includes a cash prize, will be presented before an early afternoon presentation of Warren’s “The Legacy of the Civil War” by John Burt, professor of English at Brandeis University and a member of the Warren Center Advisory Group. Both will take place in WKU’s Mass Media and Technology Hall Auditorium.

The Warren/Brooks Award was established in 1995 and is made possible by an endowment from the late Eleanor Clark Warren, the Warren Estate and Western Kentucky University. The award is given annually to recognize an outstanding work of literary criticism that exemplifies in spirit, scope and integrity the kind of innovative critical interpretation of literature offered by Warren and Brooks, his frequent collaborator.

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For more information, contact Mary Ellen Miller, (270) 745-5721.

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