Southern Books

Flannery O'connor And The Christ-Haunted South

Ralph C. Wood

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $9.78

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Books & Reading -> History of Books
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Books & Reading -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Books & Reading -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Sensitive Cultural and Theological Analysis 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Wood's study is a sensitive treatment that brings Southern culture and O'Connor's fiction into a reciprocally illuminating focus. Six of the book's eight chapters appear here as much-revised versions of previously published essays. Even so, the book hangs together effectively as a monograph. Its signal contribution to studies of O'Connor's work comes especially in its theological analysis, which relates her thought not only to the Catholic tradition but to twentieth-century Protestant theologians like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Wood begins in chapter 1 by detailing how O'Connor's orthodox, sacramental and deeply iconic Catholicism gave her an appreciation for the Bible-centered Protestant fundamentalism typical of her native region. While revisiting "The Violent Bear It Away," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and "Parker's Back," he shows how the fanaticism of the backwoods country preachers and misfits in her fiction opens them to transcendent realities to which the nihilism and lukewarm liberalism of modernity remain oblivious.

He proceeds in chapter 2 to describe how the great "burden of Southern history"--the South's loss in the Civil War--imbued Southern culture and its literature with a sense of human finitude at once tragic and true. Wood brings O'Connor's unique perspective into conversation with H. L. Mencken's notorious disdain for the South, which he derisively labeled "the Sahara of the Bozart"; with the Agrarian author and former disciple of Mencken, Allen Tate, whose defense of antebellum Southern culture obliged him to jettison the specific truths of Christianity; and with Eugene Genovese, the former Marxist cum rehabilitated Catholic, whose analysis of antebellum slavery provides a corrective to Tate. Wood also makes brief forays into the Scopes trial, snakehandling, and O'Connor's luminous story "Greenleaf."

When he turns in chapter 3 to "the problem of the color line," Wood reveals how complicated were O'Connor's attitudes toward race relations. Although she was a strong advocate of the basic goals of the Civil Rights movement, she disdained condescending, quick fixes that would force blacks and whites into a contrived and ultimately dehumanizing closeness. Wood makes fruitful comparisons and contrasts with another of the South's great writers, Eudora Welty, and with O'Connor's friend, the Northern liberal Maryat Lee; he follows them with careful readings of "The Enduring Chill" and "Everything That Rise Must Converge."

Chapter 4, "The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region" scrutinizes the formal gestures that established both closeness and distance in the social intercourse of blacks and whites in the South. Wood offers an extended treatment of the last story O'Connor wrote, "Judgment Day" (a recast version of her first story, "The Geranium") and an acute theological analysis of her personal favorite, "The Artificial Nigger."

In chapter 5 Wood examines preaching as the 'sacrament' of Southern fundamentalism, drawing on the work of Karl Barth, whom many readers will be surprised to learn was a major influence on O'Connor, and giving voice to her three multigenerational preachers, the nihilist Hazel Motes in "Wise Blood," the teen Bevel Summers in "The River," and the child Lucette Carmody in "The Violent Bear It Away".

In chapter 6, Wood's essay on "demonic nihilism" as "the chief temptation of modernity" demonstrates how full and fair a hearing O'Connor gave the atheists in her fiction, the most memorable of whom is Hulga Hopewell in the painfully comic story "Good Country People." Wood details O'Connor's respect for Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus and resorts once again to Barth, this time for his exploration of the nature of evil.

Chapter 7, "Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness," traces O'Connor's understanding of vocation with a close examination of her uncouth prophet, Mason Tarwater. For O'Connor "the image of God in man must be wrenched from its unnatural thralldom to false lords"; vocation, defined as "the summons to live out the privileges and requirements of the Christian faith" is the touchstone of this wrenching.

Wood's final chapter 8, "Climbing the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O'Connor's Vision of the World to Come, " examines O'Connor's eschatology, focusing on those moments of grace that conclude most of her short stories and choosing as his examples the atheist Rayber in "The Violent Bear It Way" and Mrs. Ruby Turpin in "Revelation."

To his credit, Wood never stumbles over the scandal of O'Connor's stories, never blunts the hard edge of her characters, and never apologizes for the grotesque idiom she chose for her work. Perhaps the greatest merit of his study, though, is his engagement with the irreducibly theological character of O'Connor's fiction and unashamed owning of the truth claims that suffuse it.

Editorial Review:

Forty years after her death, Flannery O’Connor’s fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, "Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" breaks important new ground, using O’Connor’s work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. According to Ralph Wood, it is O’Connor the Southerner and the believer who best helps us to confront hard cultural questions — including the role of fundamentalism, the legacy of slavery, and the lure of nihilism — with profound religious answers.

The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction

Susan Ketchin

Amazon Price: $27.00 List Price: $30.00 By: University Press of Mississippi Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $3.44

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Anthologies
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> Classics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

12 Southern authors discuss God, faith and warped religion. 5 out of 5 stars.
25 of 26 people found this review helpful.

Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39 in 1964, leaving us hard, clear and corrosive writing. Susan Ketchin's book examines the influence of religion on 12 living authors who shuffle down some of the same paths Miss O'Connor traveled. Miss O'Connor is the region's reigning recalcitrant Catholic. With discipline, spite and relentless rewriting, she created ornery, twisted and largely unrepentant Protestant characters. O'Connor looms large over this book (the title is her words). But that doesn't mean everyone here likes her. More than one finds her mean-spirited. Sheila Bosworth, another Catholic and friend of the late Walker Percy, asks why, if we are to thank God for every good thing, why we can't indict him for the bad ones. Sitting across a plate of catfish with Larry Brown on his 40th birthday is an experience none of us are going to have, but Ms. Ketchin did. We get to listen to the former firefighter tell about a long effort to cut a boy out of a mangled car, with his former partner, now dead. His reflection on how one detail could have ended the boy1s life shows why Mr. Brown is a thoughtful writer. The value of this book is that the authors tend to be more direct in interviews than they allow themselves in their fiction. Ms. Ketchin's clear-eyed observation tells us what's important; what shaped the writer. It1s reassuring to see these authors are also decent men and women, who struggle with the same burdens their readers do. But they think about it longer and harder than most of us care to. "You spend most of your time thinking about, meditating upon, trying to dissect and understand just those aspects of the human animal that other human beings try their damndest never to thing about," Harry Crews says. Ms. Ketchin mentions the occasional patronizing tone of critics who read Southern women1s fiction. "Pull up a rocker on the front porch and pour a glass of ice tea," one writes in a favorable review of a Lee Smith novel. While Ms. Smith may have a different style than Joan Didion, she is just as sharp an observer of detail, and perhaps even better at genuine inner dialogue of her characters. No one would suggest pulling up a rocker for a Didion novel, nor should they for Ms. Smith, who is a serious writer blessed with a sharp sense of humor. To note Ms. Ketchin is the wife of author Clyde Edgerton would seem to be almost as condescending. But near the end of the book, she sets up the tape recorder for her spouse of more than 20 years, and gives him the same even-handed, thoughtful treatment she used for the other 11. I was glad to know she was married to an author; I believe it gives her an insight to their methods and frustrations others would not possess. For writers, it's heartening to see their heroes make mistakes and retell their shortcomings and doubt. I don't know for sure, but I bet Mr. Brown would take out a reference to Tom Selleck in "A Roadside Resurrection," if he had it to do over again. A man who wears a Flannery O'Connor T-shirt to book signings surely knows the value of making a story timeless. Will readers 30 years from now know who Tom Selleck was? Probably not. But then to hear him say "Whatever good is in this world has to have teeth in it if evil is to be dealt with," is worth the price of the book. Almost all of the dozen writers here say for fiction to last, it has to address things that matter -- life and death; good vs. evil; salvation or perdition. Lisa Ashmore johelton@earthlink.net

Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-millennial South (Southern Literary Studies)

Hal Crowther

Amazon Price: $21.02 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Louisiana State University Press Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $4.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Essays -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Essays -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

To read Hal Crowther is to find yourself agreeing with views on topics you never knew you cared so much about. In Gather at the River, Crowther extends the wide-angle vision of Southern life presented in his highly acclaimed collection Cathedrals of Kudzu. He cuts to the heart of recent political, religious, and cultural issues but pauses to appreciate the sweet things that the South has to offer, like music, baseball, great writers, and strong women. Some of these essays invite debate. Crowther gives a balanced perspective on the tragedy of the Branch Davidians at Waco, shedding light on a different world of religiosity and revealing urban media prejudices for what they are. He describes the unique heroism of a fallen Marine in the Iraq war, a war fought by one class and promoted by another. And his solution to racial conflict—interracial procreation—will jump-start readers’ sensibilities. In other chapters, Crowther discusses the grim portrayal of the South in early film and the triumphs of Southern music. His literary essays include appreciations of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Elizabeth Spencer, and Wendell Berry, and a biting lampoon of exhibitionist memoirs. Among the Southerners Crowther profiles with pride are the art historian and Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe; the great, cursed baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson; the curmudgeonly realist H. L. Mencken; and the singer Dolly Parton, whose candid artifice inspires the author’s litmus test for Southern authenticity.

In the writing of Hal Crowther, lyrical language joins wit and frankness, and the South—with all its burdens, curiosities, and promises—comes vividly into view. Gather at the River enhances Crowther’s reputation as one of the most eloquent and original observers of Southern letters, morals, and manners.

Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui Tradition (Pitt Illuminations)

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Amazon Price: $24.95 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 7 to 12 days By: University of Pittsburgh Press Amazon Marketplace: 11 new & used starting at $19.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> Classics -> General

Editorial Review:

Hosam Aboul-Ela provides a startlingly original perspective on Faulkner, examining his work in the transnational context of the “Global South”: the geopolitical and economic dynamics of the post-Reconstruction period that link the American South to the larger colonial tradition. Other South thus raises new questions as to the scope and attitude of Faulkner's project, positioning Faulkner's work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality.

Engaging with ideas and thinkers from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, stepping outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a fresh perspective on our shared literary heritage and a new look at an iconic literary figure.

Parting the Curtains: Interviews With Southern Writers

Amazon Price: $11.01 List Price: $12.95 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks By: John F. Blair Publisher Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $3.06

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> History & Criticism -> 20th Century
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> History & Criticism -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> History & Criticism -> Literary Theory

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Interviews and Pictures 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book covers many authors over different periods in their careers. You feel like you are in the room with them. The most outstanding element is the photo of Shelby Foote smiling. To my knowledge no picture of the man with a smile on his face has ever been published. This may seem trivial, but if you are a fan of Shelby Foote, you know he makes a point of not smiling for photographs. This is a good book with great insight into the minds of many Southern writers.

Editorial Review:

As a group, Southern writers have long contributed, perhaps more than any other group, to American literature. In this collection of intelligent and candid interviews, Powell reveals a trove of fascinating and intimate details about the lives and works of such Southern literary luminaries as Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, Walker Percy, William Styron, and Alex Haley.

Richard M. Weaver 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind

Fred D. Young

Amazon Price: $39.95 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of Missouri Press Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $11.47

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Philosophers
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Richard M. Weaver was a complex individual who lived chiefly to think and to write. Interest in his work remains high, even though he died in his early fifties and much of his work, including The Southern Tradition at Bay and Visions of Order, appeared posthumously. In his short life, Weaver made significant contributions to the study of rhetoric, the criticism of culture, the teaching of composition, and the understanding of America's South, influencing a generation of other scholars along the way. This intellectual biography of Weaver examines all of his works and the scholars who influenced him. Fred Young has vividly rendered this reclusive individual as he lived the life of the mind, becoming more remote from ordinary activity and moving into the realm wherein something does not come alive until it is written down, revised, and revised once more. Young accomplishes this by using Weaver's own writings on scholarship and by discussing his most representative and significant essays and books - Ideas Have Consequences, Language Is Sermonic, and others. Young also interviews the people who were closest to Weaver: Russell Kirk; Cleanth Brooks; Clifford Amyx, an artist and intellectual; his sister Polly Weaver Beaton; and Professor Wilma R. Ebbitt, a colleague and friend during Weaver's years at the University of Chicago. Although many have associated Weaver with the Vanderbilt Agrarians and have stereotyped him as a conservative, this work makes plain that Weaver cannot be seen simply and wholly in this light. Many of the stands Weaver took, such as opposing the registration of Communists during the McCarthy era, set him apart from the conservative mainstream and made people of manydifferent political persuasions respect his ideas. Although much has been written on Weaver over the years, this is the first full-length book to chronicle this solitary man's intellectual life. Anyone with an interest in intellectual and cultural history, the life and letters of the South, political thought, speech, or classical rhetoric will find this study a fascinating examination of Weaver's mind.

Conversations with Larry Brown (Literary Conversations Series)

Amazon Price: $17.16 List Price: $22.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University Press of Mississippi Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $11.59

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988, Mississippi native Larry Brown (1951-2004) published two collections of short stories, five novels, a memoir, and two collections of essays. Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most respected and compelling new voices in contemporary southern literature.

Conversations with Larry Brown brings together interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004. The collection includes interview material from a full-length film documentary about Brown's life and work as well as two previously unpublished pieces. Across these conversations, Brown offers insights into all of his books and several of his short stories.

Jay Watson is professor of English at the University of Mississippi and the author of Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner..

I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

Houston A. Baker

Amazon Price: $25.00 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $11.15

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

I Don't Hate The South takes its title from the famous declaration by Faulkner's character Quentin Compson in the novel Absalom, Absalom!. The book traces Baker's own ambivalent relationship to the South and its various protocols of family and black expressive cultural independence through a memoiristic recounting of the author's various academic posts, family dramas, travels, and engagements with that most famous of southern authors, William Faulkner as well as the black expressive "experimentalists" Percival Everett and Ralph Ellison. I Don't Hate The South's central claim is that the South is a laboratory, metaphor, and proving ground for American polity as a whole. W. E. B. Du Bois noted: "As the South goes, so goes the nation!" Houston Baker sets out to show the present-day wisdom of Du Bois's observation in a post-Hurricane Katrina moment of national family crisis. With incisive wit, scrupulous literary and cultural analysis, and vivid portraits of members of his own family, the author provides captivating reading and an object lesson on the United States' regional and national interdependence.

Desire, Violence, & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy (Southern Literary Studies)

Gary M. Ciuba

Amazon Price: $38.49 List Price: $47.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Louisiana State University Press Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $33.80

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> Classics -> General

Editorial Review:

In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction—Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy—expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned —and sometimes ritually sanctified—victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote. In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence—violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified. AUTHOR BIO: Gary M. Ciuba is the author of Walker Percy: Books of Revelations and numerous articles on modern southern fiction. He is a professor of English at Kent State University.

Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990

Patricia Yaeger

Amazon Price: $20.00 List Price: $20.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University Of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $9.43

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Books & Reading -> Women Writers & Feminist Theory
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> Classics -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> History & Criticism -> 20th Century

Editorial Review:

The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.

For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.

Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.

The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.