Abstract

A comprehensive approach to Flannery O'Connor's fiction looks behind conventional literary and historical categorization and finds what sources inform them. Her temporal disposition embraces a modern inclination tempered by a larger humane experience. Her literary impulses were nurtured primarily during the sociological temperament of what Rubin denotes as the Southern Renascence . Her fiction reflects the influence of her association with leaders of the Fugitive and Agrarian groups, especially Allen Tate . This study describes the social and moral issues that emerged when O'Connor and Tate were writing and shows how each came to similar resolutions. ;O'Connor's management of violence, the focus of chapter three, most importantly indicates an Agrarian affinity. Both O'Connor and Tate consider violence to be the necessary force to bring about religious understanding. People are in such a state of blindness, ignorance or complacence, that they must suffer violence in order to see. The positions assumed in the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand identify what the Vanderbilt scholars saw at the time as a dehumanization and depletion of natural and human resources at the hands of Northern industrialism. O'Connor's people, in their most extreme spiritual states, are dehumanized, which is the ultimate unnaturalness. Chapter four discusses how notions of human and spiritual unnaturalness are dramatized in O'Connor's short stories and Wise Blood. Her fiction continually depicts what the Agrarians saw as the most damaging effects of industrialism--displacement of human values and alienation. Chapter V examines O'Connor's and Tate's view of the role of the past in the South's present. Several short stories illustrate that the tension between the traditional and changing South is reflected in characters' struggles to define their own roles and voices. ;O'Connor's fiction is invigorated by Southern Agrarian philosophy. The force that guides the vision and expression O'Connor shares with the Agrarians is the belief that the South and the Southern people are in need of redefinition and self-appraisal, always within a larger context