Overview

Josephine Hendin's landmark study explores the fiction that erupted from Flannery O'Connor's enigmatic contradictions: she was the dutiful daughter of a conservative Southern family, the uncompromising Roman Catholic, the stoic figure enduring a painful fatal illness, and the author of strange and violent tales that exploded all the virtues of heritage, obedience, and faith. The tension between those disparate selves drives the complexity of Flannery O'Connor's literary achievement into the center of American experience. While other critics have chosen to treat Flannery O'Connor as a traditional Southern or dogmatic Catholic writer, Hendin takes a perceptively fresh view of her work in the context of contemporary fiction. Hendin illuminates all her fiction, beginning with the early novels and ending with Everything that Rises Must Converge. Differentiating her from other Southern writers, Hendin shows how O'Connor created a unique art, remarkable for its portrait of the agony of American yearning.

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9781606084656

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Reviews

I have read The World of Flannery O'Connor with admiration and profit. It is a work of rare critical acuteness, and shows an understanding of the mind of contemporary American fiction--which is as rare as it is penetrating. A most valuable book. --Alfred Kazin The World of Flannery O'Connor is a brilliant book. Hendin . . . has delineated more clearly than anyone before her what is genuinely modern about Flannery O'Connor. --Studies in Short Fiction A discerning and distinctive critical analysis of the authentic and conflicting voices of Flannery O'Connor that create the tension of her writing and reflect the contradictory aspects of her inner self and outer role in a life that ended in dread illness in 1964. --The Booklist

I have read The World of Flannery O'Connor with admiration and profit. It is a work of rare critical acuteness, and shows an understanding of the mind of contemporary American fiction--which is as rare as it is penetrating. A most valuable book. --Alfred Kazin The World of Flannery O'Connor is a brilliant book. Hendin . . . has delineated more clearly than anyone before her what is genuinely modern about Flannery O'Connor. --Studies in Short Fiction A discerning and distinctive critical analysis of the authentic and conflicting voices of Flannery O'Connor that create the tension of her writing and reflect the contradictory aspects of her inner self and outer role in a life that ended in dread illness in 1964. --The Booklist

Author Information

Josephine Hendin is Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945, HeartBreakers: Women and Violence in American Culture and Literature, and editor of the The Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture. Her novel, The Right Thing to Do won an American Book Award. Her literary essays have appeared in The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, American Literary History and other publications.

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