Understanding Flannery O' Connor

by Margaret Earley Whitt

Book Overview

Manners, mystery, and maniacs in O'Connor's unforgettable fiction

Describing Flannery O'Connor's fiction as "violent, grotesque, and horribly funny, with a twist," Margaret Earley Whitt explores the canon of the Georgia writer whose work has long haunted and harassed its readers. In a comprehensive survey that encompasses O'Connor's short stories, novels, essays, and letters, as well as the body of criticism that has proliferated since...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570032254
• ISBN13: 9781570032257
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Good introduction for the beginning Flannery O'Connor scholar...

Margaret Whitt's text is intended to serve as a guide or companion to Flannery O'Connor's work "for students as well as good nonacademic readers." She provides an overview of O'Connor's life, her professional career, and ascertains her status as a writer. Suggests that "two essential components" drive O'Connor's fiction: the fact that she "was both Southern -- ripe with its manners -- and Roman Catholic, replete with its mystery." States that it is the blending and weaving together of these two components -- manners and mystery -- that make her stories so "strikingly, stridently different." Offers readers close readings of all of O'Connor's fiction and discusses the fourteen essays included in O'Connor's collection of "occasional writings" (Mystery and Manners) and in O'Connor's letters colelcted by Sally Fitzgerald in The Habit of Being. Devotes the final chapter to a discussion of the nine stories that are included in The Complete Stories, published in 1971. Supplies, throughout the volume: reference notes at the end of each chapter; information related to date and place of publication of materials; criticism by contemporary reviewers; and comments by O'Connor herself -- gleaned from her letters and essays. Concludes with a seventeen-page classified bibliography and a comprehensive index to the main body of the book. Reviewer's note: Dr. Whitt completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver, where she submitted her dissertation, titled "'The Meaning of Every Dim Implicit Hint': A Study of Manners in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor," in 1986. R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University