Desire, violence & divinity in modern southern fiction : Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy /
Ciuba, Gary M.
Baton Rouge, Fla. : Louisiana State University Press,
2011, c2007.
"In this 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 Rene Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-271) and index.
1. The hanged man at old Sardis church : the culture of violence and the violence of culture in the south -- 2. "Given only me for model" : Porter's "Miranda" stories and the dilemmas of mimetic desire -- 3. "Like a boulder blocking your path" : O'Connor's Skandalon in The Violent bear it away -- 4. McCarthy's enfant terrible : incarnating sacred violence in Child of God -- 5. No more for Azazel : victimizing the sign and signifying the victim in Percy's The Thanatos syndrome.
"In this 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 Rene Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model."--Jacket.
Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890-1980
O'Connor, Flannery
McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-
Percy, Walker, 1916-1990
American literature
American literature
Violence in literature.
Desire in literature.