Recovering Interpretative Possibilities in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the responses to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the reception history, and argues for the need to recover the breadth of interpretation her work invites. The writers discuss the concept of authorial intent as it relates to O’Connor and lay out their premise that author, text, and audience all play roles in the process of meaning making. The authors also provide chapter summaries for each of the essays included in the volume.

Afterword

Bruce Gentry, the editor of Flannery O’Connor Review, reflects on the state of O’Connor studies. He shares the story of why and how the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes on O’Connor came about, reviews a few of the struggles and successes, and shares a few thoughts about the future of O’Connor scholarship. He argues that while he no longer thinks we will ever fully figure out O’Connor as a Catholic writer, he believes O’Connor wanted to be taken seriously, first and foremost, as a writer, and, therefore, he has defined his mission as working to expand O’Connor studies beyond the southern and beyond the Catholic. He then discusses O’Connor’s broad appeal in disciplines beyond English. He celebrates the increasing diversity in approaches to her work and anticipates that the trend will continue as we find new answers to old questions and answers to brand new questions too.

Country People: Depictions of Farm Women in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction

Monica Miller recuperates O’Connor’s female farmers and mothers, women whose labor keeps their dependents financially stable but whose complaints and unhappiness often invite censure from other characters as well as readers and critics. Miller offers a more sympathetic reading of these women, suggesting that their preoccupations might stem less from pettiness than from practical concerns about managing farms and finances. To support her argument, Miller draws on archival material newly acquired by Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. These materials, excerpted here for the first time, provide context about the realities of managing Andalusia, the O’Connor family farm. Ultimately, Miller argues that through these women farmers and mothers, O’Connor’s stories offer a realistic representation of farm life that corrects the romantic depictions that appear in the fiction of many of O’Connor’s contemporaries.

Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic Science Fiction

Where convention categorizes southern literature as especially preoccupied with the past, Doug Davis reads O’Connor’s stories as science fiction, highlighting the surprising extent of her engagement with futurism. From time travelers to space cadets to cyborgs, O’Connor’s stories are filled with images and characters that appear in popular science fiction. Davis argues that for O’Connor, the vocabulary of science fiction provides a way to both explore and critique the promises and effects of technological progress in the context of Cold War America.