Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist [Hardcover]

Richard Giannone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0252025288 | ISBN-13: 978-0252025280

'Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist', Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life on the family farm in rural Georgia, which she claimed was accessible 'only by bus or buzzard'. During this productive, solitary time she became increasingly fascinated by fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment. In "Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist", Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics, a bond that stemmed from her faith as well as her own isolation and physical suffering from lupus, and the ways in which their strange, still voices illuminate her fiction.Distinguishing among various desert calls summoning O'Connor's protagonists to solitude and renunciation, Giannone shows how these characters live out a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of grappling with their demons and drawing closer to God. Combining discussion of her fiction with biographical detail and excerpts from the writings of the early Christians, Giannone reveals how O'Connor's treatment of the desert brings self-denial and self-scrutiny to bear on the urgencies of modern American life. Through the insights of the ancient monastics, "Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist" not only clarifies the bizarre demonology that has long perplexed O'Connor's readers but also reveals in her fiction an attention to the qualities of inner life and a prescient concern for the rampant evil and dissensions of the outside world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In "Flannery O'Connor: Hermit Novelist," Richard Giannone, who teaches English at Fordham University, places O'Connor's spiritual and theological perspective alongside the ancient ascetic traditions of the fourth, fifth, and sixth century Egyptian desert. This approach, though carried out in rather academic prose, illuminates O'Connor's bleak world and makes "Hermit Novelist" a very useful book....

By drawing on what O'Connor says, both explicitly and implicitly, about her serious reading of the early monastic Christian ascetic movement, Giannone makes sense of both of these difficulties. O'Connor, Giannone says, employs a "poetics of solitude." The reader is meant to understand that the solitary emotional and moral wasteland in which O'Connor's characters find themselves is the modern equivalent of the desert in which the ancient Christian solitary sought God. As was true for the early Christian teachers, O'Connor's modern parched and hungry "Abbas and Ammas" also seek God without benefit of the luxuries, comforts, and the easy and callous self-deceptions of the self-serving, loveless civilization they emphatically critique. As solitaries, they struggle, as do the monks, against the temptations and illusions of the devil and of their own pride-filled wills, which, in the words of the desert father Abba Poemen, "have become the demons" for them. -- From Beliefnet

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (January 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252025288
• ISBN-13: 978-0252025280
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,856,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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