With an emphasis on examining Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation during her lifetime, and the growth of that reputation after her death, this collection brings together fifty years of critical reactions to her work.

Thirty one short stories that offer a picture of the Deep South.

With an emphasis on examining Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation during her lifetime, and the growth of that reputation after her death, this collection brings together fifty years of critical reactions to her work.

This volume contains include twenty-eight reviews and critical essays related to American writer and essayist Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) life and work. The collection begins with an introduction, which survey's O'Connor's career and the critical reaction to it, the remaining selections are arranged into three sections -- the first, offers twelve reviews dealing with O'Connor's two novels, and her collections of short stories and essays; the second section provides "tributes and reminiscences"; and, the third section includes a chronological record of the critical response to the writing, with positive as well as negative soundings are acknowledged.

"In Revising Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Hemple Prown addresses the conflicts O'Connor experienced as a "southern lady" and professional author. Placing gender at the center of her analytical framework, Prown considers the reasons for feminist critical negelct of the writer and traces the cultural origins of the complicated aesthetic that informs O'Connor's fiction, but published and unpublished.".

This study explores the dualities that inform the entire body of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. From the almost unredeemable world of Wise Blood to the climactic moments of revelation that infuse The Violent Bear It Away and Everything That Rises Must Converge, O'Connor's novels and stories wrestle with extremes of faith and reason, acceptance and revolt; they arch between cool narrative and explosive action, between a sacramental vision and a primary intuition of reality.

These ten essays, seven of which are previously unpublished, reflect the broadening of critical approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work over the past decade. The essays offer both new directions for, and new insights into, reading O'Connor's fiction. Some essays probe issues that, until recently, had been ignored. Others reshape long-standing debates in light of new critical insights from gender studies, rhetorical theory, dialogism, and psychoanalysis. Topics discussed include O'Connor's early stories, her canonical status, the phenomenon of doubling, the feminist undertones of her stories' grotesqueries, and her self-denial in life and art. Commentary on O'Connor has most often centered on her regional realism and the poetics of her Catholicism. By regarding O'Connor as a major American writer and focusing on the variety of critical approaches that might be taken to her work, these essays dispel the earlier geographic and religious stereotypes and point out new avenues of study.