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Nature and Grace in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction (Studies in Art and Religious Interpretation ; V. 2)

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Getz examines the literary structures and devices that Flannery O'Connor employs in her narratives to depict various types of grace: Thomistic grace in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" and "The Artifical Nigger"; Augustinian grace in "Greenleaf" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge"; and, Jansenistic grace in "Parker's Back" and "The Comforts of Home."

Offers a detailed reading of "The Lame Shall Enter First," finding it to be an exception to O'Connor's typical style and concerns because it "portrays more the absence than the presence of grace." Suggests that O'Connor's method (in this story) appears "Augustinian and Jansenistic," in that she uses "literary devices in such a way as to present a new mode, analogous to a Manichaean understanding of the relation of nature and supernatural."

Finds and discusses two other exceptions to her narrative of grace: "The Partridge Festival" (viewed as "a narrative of 'no grace'"); and, "Judgement Day," which "portrays nature to be so closely related to grace that no distinction between the two is possible."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University