Understanding Flannery O' Connor (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) [Paperback]

Margaret Earley Whitt (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570032254
• ISBN-13: 978-1570032257
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,407,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction for the beginning Flannery O'Connor scholar..., July 26, 2008

By 

R. Neil Scott "Writer, Professor & User Servi... (Murfreesboro, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Understanding Flannery O' Connor (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) (Paperback)

Margaret Whitt's text is intended to serve as a guide or companion to Flannery O'Connor's work "for students as well as good nonacademic readers."

She provides an overview of O'Connor's life, her professional career, and ascertains her status as a writer. Suggests that "two essential components" drive O'Connor's fiction: the fact that she "was both Southern -- ripe with its manners -- and Roman Catholic, replete with its mystery." States that it is the blending and weaving together of these two components -- manners and mystery -- that make her stories so "strikingly, stridently different."

Offers readers close readings of all of O'Connor's fiction and discusses the fourteen essays included in O'Connor's collection of "occasional writings" (Mystery and Manners) and in O'Connor's letters colelcted by Sally Fitzgerald in The Habit of Being.

Devotes the final chapter to a discussion of the nine stories that are included in The Complete Stories, published in 1971.

Supplies, throughout the volume: reference notes at the end of each chapter; information related to date and place of publication of materials; criticism by contemporary reviewers; and comments by O'Connor herself -- gleaned from her letters and essays. Concludes with a seventeen-page classified bibliography and a comprehensive index to the main body of the book.

Reviewer's note: Dr. Whitt completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver, where she submitted her dissertation, titled "'The Meaning of Every Dim Implicit Hint': A Study of Manners in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor," in 1986.

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University