Reviews for Flannery O'Connor's South

The average rating for Flannery O'Connor's South based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-04 00:00:00 Yann Roye Flannery O'Connor's South This is a biography of Flannery O'Connor's stories of fiction with characters as real as the people who lived in Milledgeville and other parts of Georgia in the 1940's and 1950's. Many of these characters had flaws of one kind or another. Some had IQ's of 80, some 100, and a few above 120, but besides their intelligence, they had other flaws or tics or were just strange and a few resided in the State of Georgia Asylum of the insane, which was also in Milledgeville. The author Robert Coles was a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School. He has written extensively of the culture and morals of writers, plain ordinary people, people who were under priviledged and a series of novels on the Children of Crisis (education, hunger, poverty) which won a Pulitzer Prize. He spent a large amount of time in the Southern part of the United States observing the people who made a difference in the culture of the United States. Flannery O'Connor is one of those people. She wrote fiction short stories and two novels of people who lived in the ordinary world around her. From the essays she wrote explaining what she meant in some of her stories- "Mystery and Manners" and from her letters, "The Habit of Being" which was not published until 1979- 14 years after she died, she tried to describe what she was attempting to write in some of her stories. They were not simple stories and the meanings that she attached to the stories were certainly not simple. The charters in these stories were fully fleshed out and there were meanings to their actions which a person who grew up outside the South had not lived the same lives as Flannery's characters and did not know if the humor in them was real or just thrown in for laughs- they were real and they showed just how much Flannery identified with the people in her community. Robert Cole gives us an in depth investigation of the stories and novels of Flannery O'Connor- the explication of the characters actions and the meanings behind these actions. O'Connor was an intellectual writer of the highest order and she had the faith and beliefs of her Catholic Faith and the motivations behind her writing showing her vast knowledge of the history and the major beliefs of the Catholic Church. She also knew the teaching of the major theologians of the Catholic faith including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Coles ties the strange actions and beliefs of O'Connor's characters as more than the simple folk of the South and their huge prejudices not just against the African Americans as they began their civil rights movement in the late 1950's and the 1960's- the prejudices of the ecumenical conservatives of the South, but also the prejudices of the American liberals of the North who also failed to be guided by their stated beliefs. She questions her own religious views and realizes that she holds some of the same sins of both the Southern people and the Northern people, especially of the sin of pride of being able to write at the highest level of characterizations of man while doing so with a biting humor and double meanings and her sins of pride, that she could write so well and yet get her meanings across to her fourth grade readers as well as her post docs. Coles knowledge of Southern folkways assist him in interpreting O'Connor, who brought to her work an appreciation of what Coles considers the main purpose of O'Connor's storytelling: 'showing the depth of God's mysteries.' "O'Connor, in her letters only published in 1979- fourteen years after her death, makes clear just how intricately theological her mind was, as it set to work to embodying her philosophical knowledge and her vast Catholic Church history, in a series of stories. In the author's note published in the second edition of "Wise Blood", she gives a brief note of her intentions: Hazel Motes is a "Christian malgre lui" (despite himself). She directly challenges her admiring readers point out that, whereas they might admire the character Hazel for trying to rid himself of certain (Christian) obsessions, she admires him for not being able to do so. She admires him for the impediments he did not overcome - spiritual not psychological, in nature. She admires him, it can be argued for the struggle he waged, in the Augustinian tradition, against the Manichaeism which has always threatened the Catholic Church." In 'References' after the final words of Coles interpretations of Flannery O'Connor, we get a glimpse of the research Coles made to present the correct Flannery O'Connor in his book. Coles wrote the first edition of "In Flannery O'Connor's South" copyrighted in 1980. He speaks of reading in detail Flannery O'Connor's correspondence and letters published in 1979. He mentions a volume that has weathered well "The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor", a collection of essays by Melvin Friedman and Lewis Lawson in 1966. Lawson also published a very extensive Bibliography on O'Connor. In 1969 Carter Martin published "The True Country" which examined certain themes in O'Connnor's stories. Friedman wrote of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy as authors who have published work that follows the Catholic Church's doctrines and the orthodoxies. In the 1930's and 1940's there was an extreme anti-Catholic Church culture in the Southern States as well as the south Georgia confines where Flannery O'Connor grew up. There was a thorough examination of the themes of the Catholic Church being true to the church in O'Connor's art. Two books published in 1971 verified this thinking. The University Reviews such as The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review and The Partisan Review. Since 1972, Georgia College at Milledgeville has issued The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin six times with critical reviews on her work. Robert Coles has published an outstanding book on the work of Flannery O'Connor and its meaning to the Southern Writers but also to the American writers giving them the knowledge that Flannery O'Connor was one of the Finest Women Writers of the twentieth century and in this statement for 'Women' I mean all authors of either sex. Five Stars

Review # 2 was written on 2007-07-15 00:00:00 Phillip Jones This small book was exceedingly helpful. It combines Green's biography as well as an analysis of her work. The daughter of a criminal attorney, Green was the first woman to write a detective novel. George Putnam with his new company accepted it. Previously, publishers had felt that it was a genre that was not appropriate for women. She wrote thirty-five novels, twenty-three short stories, a volume of poetry and a poetic drama. She set the stage for much of what was to emerge. She influenced Agatha Christie among others. She had two female detectives, Amelia Butterworth and Violet Strange. Some of what needs to be considered when discussing her was that she was a social novelist demonstrating what the class system was like in New York City at the time. The role of women in her novels also has to be discussed. Even when they are strong characters, they are often victims, reflecting the role of women at the time. Green was no suffragette, but in her detectives she showed enterprising women. She was concerned about the impact of fathers on the family. She reflected the patriarchy of the time. She had a detective in the mould of Dickens Sergeant Cuff. She was an innovator who always constructed her mysteries carefully and also used the rational to uncover the crime. There were usually family secrets that were revealed. She also had doubles, like the two nieces in The Leavenworth Case. In other books, it might be two brothers.