Flannery O'Connor's South offers a forceful analysis, both literary and philosophical, of Flannery O'Connor's life and literature. First published in 1980, this study draws upon Robert Coles' personal experiences in the South during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his brief acquaintance with Flannery O'Connor, and his careful readings of her works. The voices and gestures of the people Coles met in the South help illuminate the social scene that influenced one of the region's most valuable and interesting writers.

This study explores the dualities that inform the entire body of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. From the almost unredeemable world of Wise Blood to the climactic moments of revelation that infuse The Violent Bear It Away and Everything That Rises Must Converge, O'Connor's novels and stories wrestle with extremes of faith and reason, acceptance and revolt; they arch between cool narrative and explosive action, between a sacramental vision and a primary intuition of reality.

For those looking to deepen their appreciation of Flannery O'Connor, Wood shows how this literary icon's stories, novels, and essays impinge on America's cultural and ecclesial condition.

Thirty one short stories that offer a picture of the Deep South.

Succinct text from photographer Barbara McKenzie and a foreword by Robert Coles provide context for this moving collection of photographs of the middle Georgia Flannery O’Connor depicted in her fiction. Whether capturing highway signs proclaiming Christ or a restaurant five hundred yards up the road, the frenzied motions of persons seized by the Holy Spirit, or quiet folks, black and white, sitting on benches in town squares, these photographs portray strikingly and sympathetically the world O’Connor wrote about in her remarkable stories.

Though stressing that Flannery O'Connor was first and foremost a writer of fiction, John Desmond maintains in Risen Sons that her orthodox Catholic theology stands at the center of her vision, providing the metaphysical base from which the fiction evolved. Given this religious context, Desmond contends that O'Connor's stated view of fiction-writing as an "incarnational act" suggests a direct connection between the practice of fiction-writing and the Incarnation of Christ--the pivotal historic event which her fiction seeks to imitate and through which her vision is revealed. O'Connor's attempts to create images that would connect the Incarnation with fictional incarnation, Mystery with mystery, were not immediately realized in her early works. It was only with Wise Blood that she came to recognize Christian historical vision as her particular fictional subject and the analogical method as the appropriate fictional strategy. This discovery made possible the convergence of her metaphysics, historical vision, and artistic technique, providing the thematic and structural basis for the quality of "unique wholeness" that distinguishes all her works. Desmond suggests that O'Connor achieved the fullest development of her analogical vision and most complete identification of thought and technique in her novel The Violent Bear It Away. Her dramatic rendering of the route Tarwater takes before he can comprehend the transcendent, mysterious source of personality and the meaning of personhood in history parallels the actions of Christ, embodying O'Connor's complex and dramatic vision of the mind's engagement with history in all its ultimate extensions of meaning.