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1990

Literature in English, North America

Southern Authors

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The Southern Misfit And The Dream Of Escape In The Fiction Of Carson Mccullers And Flannery O’Connor, Tammy Oberhausen Dec 1990

The Southern Misfit And The Dream Of Escape In The Fiction Of Carson Mccullers And Flannery O’Connor, Tammy Oberhausen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The misfit and the dream of escape are popular motifs in American literature, particularly in the literature of the South. Critical studies of works employing these themes have largely ignored the connection between the two. The Southern misfit – the Southerner who fails to or refuses to conform to his society’s strict standards – often dreams of escaping the restrictions of the South for some Northern “promised land.” In the works of two Georgia writers, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the related themes receive different treatments. Carson McCullers’s misfits in the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The …