Writing against God (Flannery O'connor Series) - Softcover

Joanne Halleran McMullen (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865546207 ISBN 13: 9780865546202

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Writing Against God approaches O'Connor's fiction through linguistic analysis and with reader response perceptions. It examines her grammatical and stylistic choices and addresses the inconsistencies her readers encounter and the conflict this engenders.

About this title

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.

About the Author

JOANNE HALLERAN MCMULLEN is the director of extended learning in continuing education at Louisiana State University. She received her BA from the University of Kansas, her MA from Ohio University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O?Connor (Mercer University Press, 1996).

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865546207
• ISBN 13: 9780865546202
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164