Flannery O'Connor - by Kathleen Feeley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

My book aims to help readers understand and appreciate O'Connor's novels and short stories. It weaves together her "place"-Milledgeville, Georgia; her purpose-to write a good story; and her preoccupations-belief, death, grace, and the devil. I explicate the influences that give depth to her fiction: her understanding and respect for the mores of the South ( including relationships between races), the books she read and marked that reveal links to her own philosophy and literary skill, and her deep religious convictions. Today, our encounters with the "other," the different one, elicit fear and lead to violence from us, as individuals and as nations. For O'Connor, the "other" is a distorted image of God. Her stories show how this distortion calls forth God's grace, and the violence in her stories enables her characters to discover their true selves. Her unique blend of talent and convictions allows her to create stories with long extensions of meaning. In our era of "quick reads," O'Connor's fiction leads us to a more contemplative mode of reading. When we finish one of her stories, we have experienced the intellectual pleasure of a finely-wrought artifact, and we also have much to think about: belief, death, grace, and the devil. Not a bad combination, that!

Review Quotes

By far the most thoroughly worked out and cogently argued analysis of the origin and embodiment of O'Connor's meanings.-- "--American Literature"

For critics who have been quartering the field for years, Sister Kathleen's study is a view halloo. To domesticate the metaphor, it is a landmark in O'Connor criticism. Though the scholars' quest may range as far and deep as Kafka criticism in the fifties, it will have to return to this book . . . . This is not a comfortable book to read. One gets the blood of the narratives on one's hands. But it shows Flannery's emblematic intelligence forcing contemporary violence and Biblical archetypes into a matrix; and creating comedy too, though she is a comic artist less of the school of Goya and Daumier than of Rouault. Her brush is dipped in pain.-- "--The New York Times Book Review"

Here is a beautifully written and penetrating study of Flannery O'Connor's writings, with particular focus on the profoundly religious and Catholic influences and meanings that informed virtually every line of her work. . . . an extremely welcome addition to the growing list of O'Connor studies.-- "--Publishers Weekly"

In an excellent foreword, the novelist Caroline Gordon calls this book the 'best guide any serious student of Miss O'Connor's work can lay hold of, ' and the increasing number of O'Connor's readers should find it indispensable.-- "--Library Journal"

This book is a must for any reader who would fully realize the art of Flannery O'Connor, who used violence and grotesquery as a means to 'make new a reality that the mind and eyes of man are accustomed to gloss over and ignore.-- "--Minneapolis Tribune"

About the Author

Kathleen Feeley, a School Sister of Notre Dame, has taught English at the Catholic University of Ghana for six years, 2003 - 2009.. Presently, she is teaching English to young African men and women in formation programs for several religious congregations, including her own, in the vicinity of Sunyani, Brong Ahafo, Ghana, where she lives. She is the former President of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, a position she held for 21 years. She received Fulbright teaching fellowships to India ( six months) and to China ( one year.) She was a Visiting Professor at the Australian Catholic University for one year.