The Eternal Crossroads
The Eternal Crossroads

Author: Leon V. Driskell

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 081318603X

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Flannery O'Connor was a writer of extraordinary power and virtuosity. Her strong supple prose blends humor, pathos, satire, and grotesquerie which leads the reader to the evil at the center of the self's labyrinth. There, she confronts that evil with originality and power, pulling the reader into consideration of the terrifying dependencies of love in the recesses of the heart. This study focuses on Flannery O'Connor's sense of the coincidence of the eternal and cosmic with worldly time and place—"the eternal crossroads"— and how that sense controls and infuses her fiction. From an examination of various influences upon Miss O'Connor's work—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Mauriac, Nathaniel West, and Hawthorne—the authors consider her novels and stories, as well as several stories never collected. Their textual analysis shows that her structures, images, motifs, and symbols became vehicles for anagogical meaning as she progressed from early promise to artistic fulfillment. Considering Miss O'Connor's own comments on her writing, the authors illuminate some frequently misunderstood features of her work, such as her "grotesques" and her stress on death and violence. In so doing they make an important contribution to our understanding of how Flannery O'Connor arrived at "the eternal crossroads."

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Author:

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published:

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781617033957

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An essential book for critical study of the works of Flannery O'Connor. "The best study of one of the best writers"--Robert Fitzgerald

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Author: R. Neil Scott

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-07

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9780521828635

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Despite Flannery O'Connor's brief life, her work, comprising novels, short stories, essays, and articles, has had a great impact on American literature and to some extent popular culture, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her writing has become well loved, well read, and often studied. This book reprints complete book reviews and excerpts from review essays on the works of Flannery O'Connor that appeared in newspapers and periodicals during the author's writing life (1945-64) and after her early death. The more than four hundred edited reviews are prefaced with a substantial Introduction that situates O'Connor within the critical milieu of post-war American letters and Southern literary tradition, and provides an overview of contemporary critical responses to her collected stories, novels, and occasional pieces. An important resource for scholars of O'Connor and of Southern literature generally, this volume reveals much about her early reception and the continuing relevance of her work.

Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies
Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies

Author: Carol Shloss

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-01-16

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 080714245X

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In Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies, Carol Shloss moves from biographical, thematic, and theological approaches and instead focuses her criticism on the successes and failures of O'Connor as a rhetorician. This valuable study of O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader. Schloss aims to return Flannery O'Connor to her readers on fathomable terms, to offer a rhetorical, rather than theological, perspective from which to understand the country preachers, square-jawed farm wives, wise rubes, foolish intellectuals, huckster Bible salesmen, killers, and other "good country people" who populate O'Connor's fiction.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Author: Preston M. Browning

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2009-08-18

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1606085344

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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.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Author: Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-05-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1625640250

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"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.

Flannery O'Connor and Teilhard de Chardin
Flannery O'Connor and Teilhard de Chardin

Author: Steven Robert Watkins

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9781433106668

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Flannery O'Connor, the renowned short-story writer, lived and fought a tumultuous battle with lupus erythematosus most of her adult life. In her last five years, she sought insightful and helpful sources to alleviate her struggle with the disease. Among these sources were the ideas and thoughts of a Jesuit-paleontologist-mystic by the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an individual who opened doors of witness to the secular world and attracted suspicious questioning from his Catholic superiors. Like a moth drawn to a flame, Flannery O'Connor, a devoted Thomist, increasingly admired the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin to the point that she incorporated his ideas into her last six short stories in the collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. This book adds significantly to the neglected study of Teilhard de Chardin's influence in the later literary development of Flannery O'Connor. This book would be a valuable asset to students and scholars focusing on American literature, Southern literature, twentieth-century Southern female writers, and Flannery O'Connor.