Flannery O'Connor

Kathleen Feeley, a School Sister of Notre Dame, has taught English at the Catholic University of Ghana for six years, 2003 - 2009. Presently, she is teaching English to young African men and women in formation programs for several religious congregations, including her own, in the vicinity of Sunyani, Brong Ahafo, Ghana, where she lives. She is the former President of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, a position she held for 21 years. She received Fulbright teaching fellowships to India (six months) and to China (one year.) She was a Visiting Professor at the Australian Catholic University for one year.

"By far the most thoroughly worked out and cogently argued analysis of the origin and embodiment of O'Connor's meanings." -American Literature "This book is a must for any reader who would fully realize the art of Flannery O'Connor, who used violence and grotesquery as a means to 'make new a reality that the mind and eyes of man are accustomed to gloss over and ignore." -Minneapolis Tribune "For critics who have been quartering the field for years, Sister Kathleen's study is a view halloo. To domesticate the metaphor, it is a landmark in O'Connor criticism. Though the scholars' quest may range as far and deep as Kafka criticism in the fifties, it will have to return to this book ... This is not a comfortable book to read. One gets the blood of the narratives on one's hands. But it shows Flannery's emblematic intelligence forcing contemporary violence and Biblical archetypes into a matrix; and creating comedy too, though she is a comic artist less of the school of Goya and Daumier than of Rouault. Her brush is dipped in pain." -The New York Times Book Review "Here is a beautifully written and penetrating study of Flannery O'Connor's writings, with particular focus on the profoundly religious and Catholic influences and meanings that informed virtually every line of her work... an extremely welcome addition to the growing list of O'Connor studies." -Publishers Weekly "In an excellent foreword, the novelist Caroline Gordon calls this book the 'best guide any serious student of Miss O'Connor's work can lay hold of,' and the increasing number of O'Connor's readers should find it indispensable." -Library Journal