The Critical Response to Flannery O'Connor

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Douglas Robillard, Jr.

ISBN: 0-313-32442-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32442-0

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344 pages

Praeger Publishers

Publication: 12/30/2004

List Price: $107.95 (UK Sterling Price: £74.95)

Availability: Print on demand

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Literature » Literature (General)

Series Title: Critical Responses in Arts and Letters

Description: As the author of such classic American short stories as A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Revelation, Flannery O'Connor has always been recognized as a distinctive voice in American literature. A devoutly Catholic, Southern author with serious literary ambitions, she dealt with topics such as the operation of grace in ordinary life, and the nature of evil, sin, and redemption. Fifty years after the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, her fiction is acclaimed for its high literary value and with the publication of her Collected Works, her work has become part of the canon of American literature. This volume includes articles on the racial, critical, and theological controversies surrounding O'Connor's work. And, rather than presenting a consensus of literary opinion, it shows how different critics arrive at radically different interpretations of a given O'Connor story or novel.

An introductory essay examines the growth of O'Connor's literary reputation and outlines the major approaches taken by literary scholars to interpreting and elucidating her work. The 47 pieces collected in this volume represent the diverse reactions her work has created. The items are grouped into three sections, each representing a chronological period: the first section compiles the reactions of critics during her lifetime, the second section compiles criticism from the 25 years that elapsed between her death in 1964 until the 1989 publication of her Collected Works, and the third section brings together new critical approaches that foreshadow future trends in O'Connor criticism.

Table of Contents:

Preface
An O'Connor Chronology
Introduction
Flannery O'Connor: The Growth of a Literary Reputation by Douglas Robillard, Jr.
Contemporary Responses: 1952-64
Southern Dissonance (1952)
A Case of Possession (1952) by John W. Simons
To Win by Default (1952) by Isaac Rosenfeld
Outraged Or Embarrassed (1953) by Joe Lee Davis
Such Nice People (1955)
That Region (1955) by Walter Elder
Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1958) by Caroline Gordon
Flannery O'Connor: A Note on Literary Fashions (1958) by Louis Rubin, Jr.
View from a Rock: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and J.F. Powers (1958) by Sister M. Bernetta Quinn
God-Intoxicated Hillbillies (1960)
A Vision Deep and Narrow (1960) by Frank Warnke
Two Up for America (1960) by Joan Didion
The Redemptive Tradition of Southern Rural Life (1960) by James Greene
The Outside and the Inside: Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960) by Sumner J. Ferris
Flannery O'Connor's Devil (1962) by John Hawkes
Flannery O'Connor's View of God and Man (1964) by Ted R. Spivey
Posthumous Responses, 1964-89
Flannery O'Connor: A Prose Elegy (1964) by Thomas Merton
The Test by Fire: Flannery O'Connor (1965) by Louise Y. Gossett
Of Ultimate Things (1965)
The Top Is A New Bottom (1965) by Guy Davenport
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) by James P. Degnan
Flannery O'Connor (1966) by Stanley Edgar Hyman
Flannery O'Connor: Christian Allegorist (1968) by Thomas M. Lorch
The Paradigm of Flannery O'Connor's True Country (1968) by Robert Drake
On Flannery O'Connor (1969) by Saul Maloff
Flannery O'Connor (1969) by Miles D. Orvell
The Evolution of Wise Blood (1970) by Stuart L. Burns Growing Up: The Violent Bear It Away (1970) by Josephine Hendin
Convergence in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge (1970) by Patricia Dinneen Maida
The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor (1972) by David Eggenschwiler
Flannery O'Connor and the Demonic (1973) by Preston M. Browning, Jr.
The Protestantism of Flannery O'Connor (1975) by Robert Milder
The Parables of Flannery O'Connor (1976) by John R. May
The Habit of Being (1977) by Sally Fitzgerald
Flannery O'Connor: Letters Larger Than Life (1979) by Robert Coles
The Double in Flannery O'Connor's Stories (1980) by Frederick Asals
The Prison of the Self: Isolation in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction (1980) by Paul W. Nisly
Home to Her True Country: The Final Trilogy of Flannery O'Connor (1980) by Diane Tolomeo
The Eye vs. the Body: Individual and Communal Grotesquerie in Wise Blood (1982) by Marshall Bruce Gentry
O'Connor's Sacred Landscapes (1985) by Louise H. Westling
Wise Blood: The Rain of History (1987) by John R. Desmond
After the Canonization: Flannery O'Connor Revisited (1989) by Benjamin Griffith
The Critics Bear It Away (1989) by Frederick Crews
New Directions in Criticism, 1990-2001
The Artificial Nigger: A Dialogic Reading (1991) by Mary Neff Shaw
The Being of Illness: The Language of Being Ill (1997) by Sue Walker
Literary Lessons: The Male Gaze, the Figure Woman (2000) by Sarah Gordon
Blinded by Whiteness: Revisiting Flannery O'Connor and Race (2001) by Julie Armstrong
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the Author: DOUGLAS ROBILLARD JR. is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff. He specializes in modern literature but as a generalist he has diverse teaching and research interests.

LCC Class: 813


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