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Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery O’Connor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives O’Connor’s writing, says Sarah Gordon, stems from the natural resistance of her imagination to the obedience expected by her male-centered church, society, and literary background. Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on O’Connor’s Catholicism; her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter; her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors; and ...
These ten essays, seven of which are previously unpublished, reflect the broadening of critical approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work over the past decade.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.
This volume presents an analysis of recurrent character types in Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, and "follows fallen men along the path leading to their redemption." The author expands on his premise that Flannery O'Connor depicts the human body as "ugly." He contends that O'Connor viewed her characters as "monsters who assail" and her readers caught "in the gruesome show of the puppet life through which they totter." The author suggests that her plots "could easily turn into nightmares" as the scenes she depicts "come to life not so much with people as with ghastly substitutes." He argues that even when Flannery O'Connor's characters are not crippled, they "appear as caricatures" because -- for her -- the human body is essentially deprived of, and not worthy of "dignity or respectability." The author closes with the suggestion that O'Connor's depiction of "physical ugliness and suffering, horrible events, and violent deaths should not distress the over-sensitive reader, " but be seen instead as opportunities for each of her characters to accept or reject Christ's offer of redemption and salvation.
This book connects the aging woman to the image of God in the work of Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Alicia Ostriker, Lucille Clifton, Mary Szybist, and Anne Babson. It introduces a canon of contemporary American women’s spiritual literature with the goal of showing how this literature treats aging and spirituality as major, connected themes. It demonstrates that such literature interacts meaningfully with feminist theology, social science research on aging and body image, attachment theory, and narrative identity theory. The book provides an interdisciplinary context for the relationship between aging and spirituality in order to confirm that US women’s writing provides unique illustrations of the interconnections between aging and spirituality signaled by other fields. This book demonstrates that relationships between the human and divine remain a consistent and valuable feature of contemporary women’s literature and that the divine–human relationship is under constant literary revision.
"This girl is a real novelist," wrote Caroline Gordon about Flannery O'Connor upon being asked to review a manuscript of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood. "She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety." This collection of letters and other documents offers the most complete portrait of the relationship between two of the American South's most acclaimed twentieth-century writers: Flannery O'Connor and Caroline Gordon. Gordon (1895-1981) had herself been a protégée of an important novelist, Ford Madox Ford, before publishing nine novels and three short story collections of her own, most notably, The Fo...
Daniel Moran explains how O'Connor attained that status, and how she felt about it, by examining the development of her literary reputation from the perspectives of critics, publishers, agents, adapters for other media, and contemporary readers.
In 1953 Flannery O'Connor was so pleased by Brainard Cheney's review of her much misunderstood first novel Wise Blood that she wrote the reviewer to thank him. What Cheney, himself a novelist, had said about the book was right on target. Very soon a friendship between this rising star of southern literature and Brainard and Frances Cheney was flourishing. Over the next eleven years there was a spirited exchange of letters and visits. Whenever possible, the Cheneys stopped by Andalusia, the O'Connor farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, and O'Connor was able to visit them at Cold Chimneys, their home in Smyrna, Tennessee. This fascinating book collecting their correspondence reveals a devoted fri...
In an age of loneliness and distraction, it can be easy to forget God’s presence in our daily lives—until we are confronted with everyday miracles like birth, death, or marriage. In his new book, The Strangeness of Truth, Fr. Damian Ferrence meditates on the way that eternal mysteries such as the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the Eucharist make themselves felt in the everyday, using scenes from his own life to illustrate and animate doctrine. Plenty of elaborate theological treatises have been written on the subjects that he addresses, but his tone is conversational and direct. His insights are designed to awaken and remind his readers of the radical truths that surround them- that God ...