Writing Against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O'Connor - Hardcover

McMullen, Joanne Halleran

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865544883 ISBN 13: 9780865544888

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Through linguistic analysis, this study defines and explores a conflict between O'Connor's literary technique and the theology she intended to convey. McMullen (English, Louisiana State U., and editor of The Southern Review ) argues that O'Connor's fiction got away from her; in the process of making

About this title

About the Author

Joanne Halleran McMullen is Managing Editor of The Southern Review and teaches in the Department of English at Louisiana State University.

From the Back Cover

Readers approaching Flannery O'Connor's work without knowledge of her Catholicism may find little evidence of it in her fiction. Yet readers who come to O'Connor's work with a prior awareness of her faith (as evidenced, for example, in her essays and correspondence) believe that her Catholicism suffuses every sentence of her fictional canon. Writing against God explores the difficulty of reconciling O'Connor's private and public insistence on the importance of Catholicism in her work with the fiction her readers encounter on the printed page. O'Connor's linguistic choices often move her fiction out of her control, producing a message in conflict with the one she stated she intended. Through a detailed examination of O'Connor's language in her two novels and in short stories that span her career, McMullen exposes a pervasive spiritual environment often in opposition to the Roman Catholic tenets O'Connor professed. Blending a reader-response approach with linguistic analysis, Writing against God offers explanations for the mysteries surrounding and the mysteries within O'Connor's fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865544883
• ISBN 13: 9780865544888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176