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The Crossroads Of Eternality And Southern Distortion: An Analysis Of Flannery O'Connor's Fiction, William J. Lisenbee

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this analysis was to explore how social and cultural values in the South determine meaning in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. Since Christianity is the predominant religion in the South, only O’Connor’s stories with obvious Christian themes and characters were chosen. Several modern literary theories, along with select criticism of O’Connor’s literature, were used to investigate the fluidity of words and their corresponding meanings in O’Connor’s fiction. Although Flannery O’Connor’s language and depictions are often open-ended, there were definite bounds located, namely, Biblical allusions and Southern cultural standards. These findings demonstrated that the language in O’Connor’s fiction is neither …