Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor’s writings were influenced by both her Southern location and her Catholic upbringing. Unlike some writers whose adventurous lives are as exciting as the stories they tell (such as...

Flannery O'Connor was influenced by several Southern writers of great repute, like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, as well as Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad. These are only...

A writer in the Southern Gothic style, Flannery O'Connor departs from other writers of this genre in several ways. Violence as a means of redemption While Gothic writers of the South often...

The short story "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" by Flannery O'Connor tells of the visit of two 14-year-old girls, Susan and Joanne, to the home of a 12-year-old girl, referred to only as "the child"...

Flannery O’Connor often uses violence in her stories for a number of reasons. In the first place, O’Connor felt that most human beings, at least in the modern era, live complacent, comfortable,...

In all—or almost all—of O'Connor's stories, one of her characters has a moment of revelation or illumination, when the grace of God breaks into this person's life and shows a glimpse of God's love...

Flannery O’Connor believed she had to use violence to shock people into paying attention to her themes. She said in her letters that "if the Christian faith is present, readers will understand the...

Similarities and differences exist between many characters in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, including between Claude and Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” and the grandmother and The Misfit in “A Good Man...

In her analyses of O'Connor earlier short stories' use of spatiality, Louise Westling observes there is a "strong sense of place despite the absence of a geopolitical region", and characters are...

Mr. Shiflet is a character in Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Arnold Friend appears in Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been." Both characters are...

Flannery O'Connor once wrote that she lived in the "Christ-haunted South." That is, O'Connor found herself in an area of evangelicals and their horror of sin which is part of the "landscape," while...

A story which has nothing to offer someone with no religious faith cannot have much to offer even those who do have faith. The fact that this question is asked of Flannery O'Connor at all is at...

In her "Christ-haunted" South, Flannery O'Connor encountered many faith-based Christians who, in their horror of sin, shielded themselves with sanctimony from their own faults. One character who...

Flannery O'Connor has been called many things religious: a Christian humanist, a sacramental writer, a fundamentalist, a Yahwist, a mean Christian, and my favorite, a "Roman Catholic not like a...

My personal favorite story is "Everything that Rises Must Converge". Prejudice meets contempt and one person's narrowness is trumped by the next person's bias. The task of escaping bigotry and...

Flannery O’Connor was a deeply devout Roman Catholic and wrote from an obviously Christian (and particularly Catholic) perspective when she became an adult author. Yet she seems to have been a...

O'Connor uses nature as a buffer between what appears to be and what really is. As a Christian believer, O'Connor sees beyond nature (the sun, clouds, and sky) to see the supernatural (God,...

A great deal of O'Connor's characterization has, obviously, to do with her own approach to life and her search for meaning through the relatively difficult portions of her life. They are described...

Flannery O'Connor was truly a genius and an extremely gifted writer. I think that there are two major things in her life that influenced her writing; her religion and her disease. She was a very...

The identification of “southern writer” may be applied to any author who lives in, sets their works in, or writes about characters who hail from the US South. It is often applied to those authors...

Perhaps O’Connor’s own words can help you come up with a subtitle. In her letters, O’Connor wrote: “I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call “A Good Man” brutal and sarcastic. The stories...

I returned this question to you and am glad you clarified it. Since you are writing on Flannery O'Connor rather than a specific work she wrote, one way to begin would be to investigate what...

The first part of the sentence it seems to have words missing; the first clause, "The factor of violence always presents in Flannery O'Connor's stories," clearly is missing its predicate. Perhaps,...

Reading O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a start for your understanding of how violence leads to salvation. You may also wish to read some criticisms of this story and others as well as...

O'Connor depicts the South in her stories as backwards place populated by unsophisticated people who are behind the times. Many of her characters are what are called grotesques, because O'Connor...

The most significant differences between Ralph Ellison's and Flannery O'Connor's assessment from the South arise from their different social locations. Because O'Connor was born to a middle-class...