Passing by the Dragon (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781620322239)

This book attempts a close reading of the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, story by story, with one eye on her use of the Bible, and her view of the Bible in relation to her own work. After introductory chapters on O'Connor's markings in her own Roman Catholic Bible, her book reviews in diocesan newspapers, and her impatience with her wayward readers, Michaels looks first at her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and then at seventeen of her short stories from her two collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Michaels takes notice of O'Connor's explicit references to the Bible (or Bibles) in her stories, and looks more particularly to the ways in which the stories are driven at least in part by specific biblical texts. Among the themes that emerge are alienation or displacement, what it means to be "good," the relation between body and spirit and between the Old Testament and the New, issues of race and gender, and above all what O'Connor once called "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

Author: Ramsey Michaels
ISBN-10: 1620322234
ISBN-13: 9781620322239
Publisher: Cascade Books
Language: English
Published: 01/11/2013
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2013