Content area
Full Text
Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor. Edited by Alison Arant and Jordan Cofer. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. x + 263 pp. [$99.00] cloth, [$30.00] paper.
Some writers have an uncanny ability, it seems, to manage the trajectory of their literary reputation from inside the grave, as critics offer new interpretations of their work every few years and general readers discover new meanings and significance in their characters or themes with social progress and change. These authors, it is a cliché to say, were born fifty or hundred years before their time; their contemporaneity lasts forever and their relevance remains fluid with historical change. Considering the number of books and articles published on her two novellas and thirty-one stories in the last six decades since her death in 1964, we can see that Flannery O'Connor is one of these writers. Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor (Hall, 1985), edited by Melvin Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark, collected the representative essays of the first twenty years (1964-1985). Most of this early criticism was largely biographical, focused primarily on two prominent aspects of the author's life: the region she came from-southern Georgia-and the religion she grew up in-Catholicism. In his introductory essay, Friedman calls O'Connor an "Agrariannurtured" rural southerner whose Catholic faith was closely tied to her "habit of being" (2). He locates her writing between modernism and postmodernism, as he highlights some of the major contributions to date by other authors such as Caroline Gordon and Eudora Welty, and by scholars such as Frederick Asals, John Hawkes, Martha Stephens, Josephine Hendin, Carol Shloss, Claire Kahane, and Andre Bleikasten.
But Friedman also takes note of "disturbed rumblings" (2) about repetitions and redundancies in O'Connor criticism. Among these were essays such as John R. May's "The Methodological Limits of Flannery O'Connor's Critics" published in The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin (15 [1986]: 16-28) and Ben Satterfield's "Wise Blood, Artistic Anemia, and the Hemorrhaging of O'Connor Criticism" published in Studies in American Fiction (17.1 [1989]: 33-50). In response to these critical opinions, several new books with fresh new looks at the author appeared; most of these moved away from the two key areas of focus-region and religion-of the previous years, and focused on aspects that had been either overlooked or ignored. In Flannery...