Flannery O'Connor was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the "Library of America", the definitive edition of American authors. Forty years after her death, O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those who know nothing of O'Connor and her work, this new study by Ralph C. Wood offers one of the finest introductions available. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, it breaks important new ground. Unique to Wood's approach is his concern to show how O'Connor's stories, novels, and essays impinge on America's cultural and ecclesial condition. He uses O'Connor's work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. Indeed, he argues here that O'Connor's fiction has lasting, even universal, significance precisely because it is rooted in the confessional witness of her Roman Catholicism and in the Christ-haunted character of the American South. According to Wood, it is this O'Connor - the believer and the Southerner - who helps us at once to confront the hardest cultural questions and to propose the profoundest religious answers to them. His book is thus far more than a critical analysis of O'Connor's writing; in fact, it is principally devoted to cultural and theological criticism by way of O'Connor's searing insights into our time and place. These are some of the engaging moral and religious questions that Wood explores: the role of religious fundamentalism in American culture and in relation to both Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the practice of racial slavery and its continuing legacy in the literature and religion of the South; the debate over Southern identity, especially whether it is a culture rooted in ancient or modern values; the place of preaching and the sacraments in secular society and dying Christendom; and the lure of nihilism in contemporary American culture. Splendidly illuminating both O'Connor herself and the American mind, Wood's Flannery "O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" will inform and fascinate a wide range of readers, from lovers of literature to those seriously engaged with religious history, cultural analysis, or the American South.

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction A Roman Catholic at Home in the Fundamentalist South The Burden of Southern History and the Presence of Eternity within Time The Problem of the Color Line: Race and Religion in Flannery O'Connor's South The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region Preaching as the Southern Protestant Sacrament Demonic Nihilism: The Chief Moral Temptation of Modernity Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of the World to Come Index of Names and Subjects Index of Scripture References

About the Author

Ralph C Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. His other books include The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists and The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth.

Reviews

Wood, one of our most astute critics of Christianity and literature, offers a splendid study of O'Connor, one of our most enigmatic Southern writers. Raised in Savannah and Milledgeville, Ga., O'Connor found herself a Catholic in a deeply Protestant South. But as Wood demonstrates, she was at home there, as she used her stories and novels to challenge what she saw as the sentimental piety of her own faith and the dullness of the Protestant liberalism of her time. Drawing on O'Connor's fiction, letters, book reviews and occasional writings, Wood examines key topics from race and the burden of Southern history to preaching and vocation. Although the depth of O'Connor's religious devotion reflected the sacramentalism of her Catholic faith, Wood ingeniously points out the debt she owed to the Bible-centered vision of Protestant theologian Karl Barth and to the images of fallenness that Reinhold Niebuhr offered in his famous work The Nature and Destiny of Man. Rather than reading thematically through O'Connor's entire oeuvre, Wood selects stories and episodes from novels that illustrate his thesis about O'Connor's concerns. Wood observes that most of O'Connor's stories end with a graceful scene in which her protagonists experience a revelatory moment, "at once disclosing the horror of sin but also overcoming the horror with hope." Although there is no end to the books on O'Connor, Wood's elegant exploration of her theological reading of Southern culture provides fresh insight into her relevance for us today. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Times Literary Supplement Powerful. Wood's literary analysis is sensitively balanced, and his theological dissection fills a void in the relatively small existing body of O'Connor criticism... Wood has successfully refreshed O'Connor's message for a new generation of scholarship.