[.ca] Flannery O'Connor and The Christ Haunted South (ISBN 0802829996)

Poignant Critical Essays:
Ralph Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is a wonderful companion volume to the writings of a great southern writer. O'Connor's fiction is best known for her short stories, chock full of southern prophets, racists, and embittered family relationships. This often offensive culture receives extraordinarily sympathetic and subtle treatment at her hands. In O'Connor's fiction, therefore, the 'backwoods' forms a biblical landscape in which the themes of salvation, sin and perdition. Fundamentalists, as in no other location, are treated with deserved respect and honor. Ralph Woods might well be a figure in an O'Connor story. A Baptist southerner who received a divine call of his own, Woods encountered Catholic intellectuals during his years in college. Drawn by the orthodoxy of Catholic faith, as well as compelling writers such as O'Connor, Walker Percy, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Wood has become a unique creature: a Catholic Baptist Southern Literary Critic. Wood's unique perspective enables him to uncover vistas in O'Connor's work which may be missed by other critics. Where else in the O'Connor critical literature might we see extensive quotations from Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Paul II? Wood argues compellingly for the cogency of O'Connor's Christ-haunted south, which despite obvious flaws, provides a challenge to northern superiority.