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The twenty-five interviews gathered here, several available in English for the first time, include craft interviews, biographical portraits, self-analyses, & wide-ranging reflections on the current literary scene.
Known for her violent, startling stories that culminate in moments of grace, Flannery O'Connor depicted the postwar segregated South from a unique perspective. This volume proposes strategies for introducing students to her Roman Catholic aesthetic, which draws on concepts such as incarnation and original sin, and offers alternative contexts for reading her work. Part 1, "Materials," describes resources that provide a grounding in O'Connor's work and life. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss her beliefs about writing and her distinctive approach to fiction and religion; introduce fresh perspectives, including those of race, class, gender, and interdisciplinary approaches; highlight her craft as a creative writer; and suggest pairings of her works with other texts. Alice Walker's short story "Convergence" is included as an appendix.
"...A collection of stories as mournful as country music. The characters, between whom the distances are long and harsh as the salt falts of Freeman's native Utah, gaze out windows and wear out floorboards pining for people who are sometimes right beside them. "--Goodreads.com.
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, Buddhists and Confucians alike flooded local Buddhist monasteries with donations. As gentry numbers grew faster than the imperial bureaucracy, traditional Confucian careers were closed to many; but visible philanthropy could publicize elite status outside the state realm. Actively sought by fundraising abbots, such patronage affected institutional Buddhism. After exploring the relation of Buddhism to Ming Neo-Confucianism, the growth of tourism to Buddhist sites, and the mechanisms and motives for charitable donations, Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.
These ten essays, seven of which are previously unpublished, reflect the broadening of critical approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work over the past decade. The essays offer both new directions for, and new insights into, reading O'Connor's fiction. Some essays probe issues that, until recently, had been ignored. Others reshape long-standing debates in light of new critical insights from gender studies, rhetorical theory, dialogism, and psychoanalysis. Topics discussed include O'Connor's early stories, her canonical status, the phenomenon of doubling, the feminist undertones of her stories' grotesqueries, and her self-denial in life and art. Commentary on O'Connor has most often centered on her regional realism and the poetics of her Catholicism. By regarding O'Connor as a major American writer and focusing on the variety of critical approaches that might be taken to her work, these essays dispel the earlier geographic and religious stereotypes and point out new avenues of study.
Flannery O'Connor believed that fiction must try to achieve something on the order of what St. Gregory wrote about Scripture: every time it presents a fact, it must also disclose a mystery. O'Connor's artistic vision was located squarely in her Catholic faith, yet she realized that to view life only through the eyes of the Church was to ignore a large part of existence. In her fiction, therefore, she explored a wider world, employing voices that challenged conceptions of both self and faith, ultimately enlarging and deepening both. In The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Brinkmeyer presents an innovative study of O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her w...
Realist of Distances - Flannery O'Connor Revisited
The Revolution of the Saints is a study, both historical and sociological, of the radical political response of the Puritans to disorder. It interprets and analyzes Calvinism as the first modern expression of an unremitting determination to transform on the basis of an ideology the existing political and moral order. Michael Walzer examines in detail the circumstances and ideological options of the Puritan intelligentsia and gentry. He sees Puritanism, in sharp contrast to some generally accepted views, as the political theory of intellectuals and gentlemen attempting to create a new government and society.
Raymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lower-middle-class North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver's work, Raymond Carver's Chronotope uses a central concept of Bakhtin's novelistics to formulate a new context for understanding the celebrated author's minimalist fiction. G. P. Lainsbury describes the critical reception of Carver's work and stakes out his own intellectual and imaginative territory by arguing that Carver's fiction can be understood as diffuse, fragmentary, and randomly ordered. Offering a fresh analysis of Carver's body of work, this book offers an extensive meditation on this major figure in postmodern U.S. fiction.