Writing against God
Subtitle: language as message in the literature of Flannery O'Connor
By: Joanne Halleran McMullen.
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Macon, Ga
Language: eng
Number of pages: 152
Subjects: O'Connor, Flannery -- Criticism and interpretation.; Authors and readers -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century.; Women and literature -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century.; Christian fiction, American -- History and criticism.; Christianity and literature -- Southern States.; Reader-response criticism.; God in literature.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [145]-148) and index.