Why Flannery O'Connor stayed home (The Prophetic poet ... (ISBN 0893850136)

Explores Flannery O'Connor's role as a literary prophet, comments on her fiction and compares her to Dante...:
Montgomery discusses, over thirty-one chapters, a wide range of topics, characters, works, and ideas which define, illustrate, and outline Flannery O'Connor's vision of the world. Offers comment on a wide variety of her work, including her book reviews and the marginalia in her personal library, while focusing upon Wise Blood and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Explores how O'Connor's role as a prophet "reveals much to us of our general cultural countryside at the crossroads of time and the timeless." Ties her writing to her concern regarding how our age appears to reject history "except in so far as it may be turned to satisfactions of the appetite for sentimentality." Concludes that Flannery O'Connor set "herself exacting standards, in her love of the truth, to be measured by the outer limits possible to her gift, and that she -- like Dante -- should be "be numbered among the eminent who have left their marks upon the community of man through their art." R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University