Title: Writing Against God
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: American Christian fiction, Authors and readers, History and criticism, Criticism and interpretation, God in literature, Christianity and literature, Women and literature, Reader-response criticism, Christian fiction, American, History, Critique et interprétation, Esthétique de la réception, Dieu dans la littérature, Christianisme et littérature, Histoire et critique, Christelijke literatuur, Histoire, Écrivains et lecteurs, Roman chrétien américain, Femmes et littérature, O'connor, flannery, 1925-1964, American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century
Places: Southern States
People: Flannery O'Connor
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3565.C57 Z784 1996