Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor

Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor
Author: Alison Arant
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496831837

Contributions by Lindsay Alexander, Alison Arant, Alicia Matheny Beeson, Eric Bennett, Gina Caison, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis, Doreen Fowler, Marshall Bruce Gentry, Bruce Henderson, Monica C. Miller, William Murray, Carol Shloss, Alison Staudinger, and Rachel Watson The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor," which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O’Connor’s work. Drawing largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute, this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring fourteen new essays, Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor disrupts a few commonplace assumptions of O’Connor studies while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention. The volume opens with “New Methodologies,” which features theoretical approaches not typically associated with O’Connor’s fiction in order to gain new insights into her work. The second section, “New Contexts,” stretches expectations on literary genre, on popular archetypes in her stories, and on how we should interpret her work. The third section, lovingly called “Strange Bedfellows,” puts O’Connor in dialogue with overlooked or neglected conversation partners, while the final section, “O’Connor’s Legacy,” reconsiders her personal views on creative writing and her wishes regarding the handling of her estate upon death. With these final essays, the collection comes full circle, attesting to the hazards that come from overly relying on O’Connor’s interpretation of her own work but also from ignoring her views and desires. Through these reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the vitality of scholarship on Flannery O’Connor.

Mystery and Manners

Mystery and Manners
Author: Flannery O'Connor
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 249
Release: 1969
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374217920

This collection shows Flannery O'Connor's extraordinary versatility and expertise as a practitioner of the essayistic form. The book opens with "The King of the Birds", her famous account of raising peacocks. There are three essays on regional writing, two on teaching literature, and four on the writer and religion. Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems, and their value to the contemporary reader -- and writer -- is inestimable. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

99 Novels

99 Novels
Author: Anthony Burgess
Publisher: New York : Summit Books
Total Pages: 170
Release: 1984
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Good Things Out of Nazareth

Good Things Out of Nazareth
Author: Flannery O'Connor
Publisher: Convergent Books
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0525575065

A literary treasure of over one hundred unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of twentieth-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith and informed all she wrote and did. Good Things Out of Nazareth, a much-anticipated collection of many of O’Connor’s previously unpublished letters—along with those of literary luminaries such as Walker Percy (The Moviegoer), Caroline Gordon (None Shall Look Back), Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools), Robert Giroux and movie critic Stanley Kauffmann. The letters explore such themes as creativity, faith, suffering, and writing. Brought together, they form a riveting literary portrait of these friends, artists, and thinkers. Here we find their joys and loves, as well as their trials and tribulations as they struggle with doubt and illness while championing their beliefs and often confronting racism in American society during the civil rights era. Praise for Good Things Out of Nazareth “An epistolary group portrait that will appeal to readers interested in the Catholic underpinnings of O'Connor's life and work . . . These letters by the National Book Award–winning short story writer and her friends alternately fit and break the mold. Anyone looking for Southern literary gossip will find plenty of barbs. . . . But there’s also higher-toned talk on topics such as the symbolism in O’Connor’s work and the nature of free will.”—Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating set of Flannery O’Connor’s correspondence . . . The compilation is highlighted by gems from O’Connor’s writing mentor, Caroline Gordon. . . . While O’Connor’s milieu can seem intimidatingly insular, the volume allows readers to feel closer to the writer, by glimpsing O’Connor’s struggles with lupus, which sometimes leaves her bedridden or walking on crutches, and by hearing her famously strong Georgian accent in the colloquialisms she sprinkles throughout the letters. . . . This is an important addition to the knowledge of O’Connor, her world, and her writing.”—Publishers Weekly

Conversations with Raymond Carver

Conversations with Raymond Carver
Author: Raymond Carver
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780878054497

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.

Passing by the Dragon

Passing by the Dragon
Author: Ramsey Michaels
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1620322234

This book attempts a close reading of the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, story by story, with one eye on her use of the Bible, and her view of the Bible in relation to her own work. After introductory chapters on O'Connor's markings in her own Roman Catholic Bible, her book reviews in diocesan newspapers, and her impatience with her wayward readers, Michaels looks first at her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and then at seventeen of her short stories from her two collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Michaels takes notice of O'Connor's explicit references to the Bible (or Bibles) in her stories, and looks more particularly to the ways in which the stories are driven at least in part by specific biblical texts. Among the themes that emerge are alienation or displacement, what it means to be "good," the relation between body and spirit and between the Old Testament and the New, issues of race and gender, and above all what O'Connor once called "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009
Genre: Women and literature
ISBN: 1438128754

Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Flannery O'Connor.

Critical Companion to Flannery O'Connor

Critical Companion to Flannery O'Connor
Author: Connie Ann Kirk
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2008
Genre: Reference (Philosophy) in literature
ISBN: 143810846X

Examines the life and writings of Flannery O'Connor, including detailed synopses of her works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.