Radical Ambivalence by
Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O'Connor's attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O'Connor's thoughts on the subject. O'Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O'Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: "I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral." Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O'Connor's fiction.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by
Wood argues that O'Connor's fiction has lasting, indeed 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.
Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor by
Inside the Church of Flannery O?Connor offers significant new essays by leading scholars?William A. Sessions, John F. Desmond, Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, Ralph C. Wood, and John R. May'who have advanced the codification of O?Connor as a writer preoccupied with religious, and especially Catholic, themes.In counterbalance, the collection presents voices of sharp dissent? chiefly Joanne Halleran McMullen and Timothy P. Caron. These scholars find themselves at odds with O?Connor's own interpretations and with much of the existing scholarship concerning her work. Contributors Helen R. Andretta, Stephen C. Behrendt, and Robert Donahoo explore theological, philosophical, and scholarly issues completely outside this dichotomy, such as comparative literature and the influence of consumer culture on her writing. The promise of such a diverse collection rests in the dialogues between and among their essays. One will not find consensus within these pages, nor even a settled path for the future of O?Connor studies. Rather, the collection puts on record the state of affairs during this period of transition, when those scholars who knew O?Connor personally are declining in number and canonical authority, and those who know her as a field of study as opposed to a flesh-and-blood human being are in ascension. Both groups have much to learn from each other.
Dear Regina by
Dear Regina offers a remarkable window into the early years of one of America's best-known literary figures. While at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop from 1945 to 1948, Flannery O'Connor wrote to her mother Regina Cline O'Connor (who she addressed by her first name) nearly every day and sometimes more than once a day. The complete correspondence of more than six hundred letters is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. From that number, Miller selects 486 letters to show us a young adult learning to adjust to life on her own for the first time. In these letters, O'Connor shares details about living in a boardinghouse and subsisting on canned food and hot-plate dinners, and she asks for advice about a wide range of topics, including how to assuage her relatives' concerns about her well-being and how to buy whiskey to use for cough medicine. These letters, which are being published for the first time with the unprecedented permission of the Mary Flannery O'Connor Charitable Trust, also off er readers important insights into O'Connor's intellectually formative years, when her ideas about writing, race, class, and interpersonal relationships were developing and changing. Her preoccupation with money, employment, and other practical matters reveals a side of O'Connor that we do not often see in her previously published letters. Most importantly, the letters show us her relationship with her mother in a much more intimate, positive light than we have seen before. The importance of this aspect of the letters cannot be overstated, given that so much literary analysis conflates her and Regina with the "sour, deformed daughters and self-righteous mothers" that critic Louise Westling sees so often in O'Connor's work.