Description: Examining the political context of O'Connor's life and her responses to the critical events and controversies of her time, this collection offers meaningful interpretations of the political significance of this influential writer's work.
Brief description: Henry T. Edmondson III is Carl Vinson Endowed Chair of Political Science and Public Administration at Georgia College, Flannery O'Connor's alma mater. He is the editor of The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics and the author of Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism.
Review Quotes:
" A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor is a strong collection of major critical voices that manages to offer both traditional and fresh readings of O'Connor's fiction. The essays are traditional in their consistent focus on O'Connor as a theologically oriented artist, but their freshness lies in their consideration of her Christian positions in relation to political philosophy, actions, and communities. It opens with John Sykes especially useful study of how O'Connor both draws on and challenges the work of the Agrarians, many of whom she knew well, and includes a number of informative influence studies. At the same time, it includes more speculative pieces such as Christina Bieber Lake's essay examining how O'Connor' Thomistic thoughts connects to ideas of personhood developing in the 21st century. The book's authors make use of names familiar within O'Connor studies such as Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Simone Weil while also introducing new connections to thinkers such as Msgr. Ivan Illich and Russell Kirk. As a whole, it demonstrates that there is much more to O'Connor scholarship than interpretative readings. There are depths to be plunged, and this book takes a challenging, deep dive." -- Robert Donahoo, coeditor of Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace