Flannery O' Connor's Radical Reality

Gretlund, Jan Nordby [Editor]; Westarp, Karl-Heinz [Editor];

ISBN 10: 1570036012 / ISBN 13: 9781570036019

Published by University of South Carolina Press, 2006

About this Item

New hardcover with dust jacket. Review material laid in. Professional packaging and prompt shipping.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Flannery O' Connor's Radical Reality
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570036012
• ISBN 13: 9781570036019
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literary Criticism

About this title

Synopsis

Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality brings together a distinguished assembly of O'Connor scholars, four of whom numbered among the writer's friends, to assess the impact of the midcentury political, religious, and social milieu on novels and short stories that consistently attract interpretive attention and are rediscovered by new generations of readers.

Relating O'Connor not only to the issues of her day but also to manifest concerns of the early twenty-first century, the essays illumine new horizons of her relevance. The contributors address the sources of O'Connor's concern with existential uncertainty and fear, relating it to the stark political light of the 1950s and 1960s; the church history and theology in which she immersed herself; the satiric eye she cast on humankind, on herself, and on her time; and such social issues as racial inequality that she could not escape despite her preoccupation with the eternal.

In addition to offering a range of observations, the contributors mark the direction of future scholarship on the wry Georgian writer and open new avenues for exploring O'Connor's work.

About the Author

Jan Nordby Gretlund is a senior lecturer in American literature at the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place; Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-racial, and Existential South; Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence; and, with Tony Badger and Walter Edgar, Southern Landscapes.

Karl-Heinz Westarp recently retired from the University of Aarhus in Denmark, where he chaired the Department of English for more than ten years. Westarp is the author of Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft and Precision and Depth: In Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories. Gretlund and Westarp's previous collections are Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher, The Late Novels of Eudora Welty, and Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited.