The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the literary career of Flannery O'Connor and to show that the writer's dramatic sense could not be separated from her vision of faith and reality. This study focuses particularly on Flannery O'Connor's status in literary circles, on her critical essays collected in Mystery and Manners, on an assessment of her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and her volumes of short stories. As a Catholic writer in the South, Flannery O'Connor observed and interpreted reality in the light of specific doctrines of the Church. Miss O'Connor's fiction puzzled and outraged her critics and readers by its tough Christianity, Southern grotesques, its themes and its violence. Implicit in this study is the premise that a critical approach to the fiction of Flannery O'Connor according to her own statements on her position of a Catholic writer in the fundamentalist South will give the reader a fuller understanding of the author's vision of faith and reality as exposed in her fiction.Chapter I traces Flannery O'Connor's literary career and shows how the author grew from a young, talented writer at the University of Iowa into an artist whose fictional output was remarkable. A study of the criticism accorded Flannery O'Connor's fiction follows a chronological pattern and shows how reviewers and critics, confused though they were by her early fiction, took her seriously during her lifetime and acclaimed her posthumous publications as unique contributions to American letters.Chapter II is devoted to both articles and essays that Flannery O'Connor published in her lifetime and several essays she never revised for publication. These essays as a whole shed light on her Catholic theological viewpoint expressed in her fiction.Chapter III is devoted to an analysis of Flannery O'Connor's early stories which remained uncollected until the publication of Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories (1971). These early stories, for the most part inferior in technique and maturity of expression, deserve attention because they contain many of the elements which foreshadow the excellence of the author's mature works.Chapter IV is concerned with the study of Flannery O'Connor's two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. In both novels Flannery O'Connor is preoccupied with religious concerns and absorbed in her Christian vision with its deep concern for the redemption and salvation of the human spirit through trials of fire and love.Chapter V deals with the bulk of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction contained in the collections A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge and Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. The most prevalent themes in the short stories deal with man's flight from a pursuing God, sin, and the problems of salvation and death.Regarding the extent to which Flannery O'Connor's vision has been shaped by her Catholic faith, it is my thesis that the artist's theological implications are the touchstones on which she built the vision of faith and reality which she revealed in her fiction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/175961 |
| Date | January 1977 |
| Creators | Dullea, Catherine M. |
| Contributors | Haave, Ethel-Mae |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 297 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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