Bøger i Flannery O'Connor Studies serien

""To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.""--Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and MannersDrowning in a river, the violent murder of a grandmother in the backwoods of Georgia, and the trans-genital display of a freak at a carnival show are all shocking literary devices used by Flannery O'Connnor, one of American literature's best pulp fiction writers. More than thirty-five years after her death, readers are still shocked by O'Connor's grotesque images. Dr. Jill Baumgaertner concentrates on O'Connor's use of emblems, those moments of sudden and horrid illumination when the sacred and the profane merge as sacrament. This readable volume is ideal for college students, O'Connor scholars, or those wishing to better understand southern gothic fiction.

When Flannery O'Connor began writing in the early 1950's, many reviewers assumed that she was little more than a talented female Erskine Caldwell, writing in the ""Southern gothic"" mode. And indeed her work was filled with freaks, one-armed con men, and pathological killers. By the time she died in 1964, serious readers of her fiction knew there was much more involved in her stories. What that ""extra"" was she called the ""added dimension,"" that is, the spiritual depth which she believed was as an ineluctable part of human life. Her stories dramatize the ways in which the holy or the sacred break into human life with the result of shocking readers out of their spiritual somnolence using characters who appear to be possessed by the Devil and who commit acts of terrifying violence. Browning bases his study of the works of O'Connor on the centrality of the yoking of opposites at the point where the opposites coincide, where violent crime and ""attraction for the Holy"" are held in tension, suggesting that out of this tension grew O'Connor's extraordinary creative power and unique vision. From this point of departure, Browning offers a detailed analysis of four O'Connor books: Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Josephine Hendin's landmark study explores the fiction that erupted from Flannery O'Connor's enigmatic contradictions: she was the dutiful daughter of a conservative Southern family, the uncompromising Roman Catholic, the stoic figure enduring a painful fatal illness, and the author of strange and violent tales that exploded all the virtues of heritage, obedience, and faith. The tension between those disparate selves drives the complexity of Flannery O'Connor's literary achievement into the center of American experience. While other critics have chosen to treat Flannery O'Connor as a traditional Southern or dogmatic Catholic writer, Hendin takes a perceptively fresh view of her work in the context of contemporary fiction. Hendin illuminates all her fiction, beginning with the early novels and ending with Everything that Rises Must Converge. Differentiating her from other Southern writers, Hendin shows how O'Connor created a unique art, remarkable for its portrait of the agony of American yearning.