Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism

In any age, humans wrestle with apparently inexorable forces. Today, we face the threat of global terrorism. In the aftermath of September 11, few could miss sensing that a great evil was at work in the world. In Flannery OConnors time, the threats came from different sourcesWorld War II, the Cold War, and the Korean conflictbut they were just as real. She, too, lived though a time of terror. The first major critical volume on Flannery OConnors work in more than a decade, Flannery OConnor in the Age of Terrorism explores issues of violence, evil, and terrorthemes that were never far from OConnors reach and that seem particularly relevant to our present-day setting. The fifteen essays collected here offer a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence. Written by both established and emerging scholars, the pieces that editors Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo have selected offer a compelling and varied picture of this iconic author and her work. Included are comparisons of OConnor to 1950s writers of noir literature and to the contemporary American novelist Cormac McCarthy; cultural studies that draw on horror comics of the Cold War and on Fordism and the American mythos of the automobile; and pieces that shed new light on OConnors complex religious sensibility and its role in her work. While continuing to speak fresh truths about her own time, OConnors fiction also resonates deeply with the postmodern sensibilities of audiences increasingly distant from her erareaders absorbed in their own terrors and sense of looming, ineffable threats. This provocative new collection presents OConnors work as a touchstone for understanding where our culture has been and where we are now. With its diverse approaches, Flannery OConnor in the Age of Terrorism will prove useful not only to scholars and students of literature but to anyone interested in history, popular culture, theology, and reflective writing.