Sura Prasad Rath

Mary Neff Shaw

These ten essays, seven of which are previously unpublished, reflect the broadening of critical approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work over the past decade. The essays offer both new directions for, and new insights into, reading O'Connor's fiction. Some essays probe issues that, until recently, had been ignored. Others reshape long-standing debates in light of new critical insights from gender studies, rhetorical theory, dialogism, and psychoanalysis. Topics discussed include O'Connor's early stories, her canonical status, the phenomenon of doubling, the feminist undertones of her stories' grotesqueries, and her self-denial in life and art. Commentary on O'Connor has most often centered on her regional realism and the poetics of her Catholicism. By regarding O'Connor as a major American writer and focusing on the variety of critical approaches that might be taken to her work, these essays dispel the earlier geographic and religious stereotypes and point out new avenues of study.

New Perspectives

Flannery O'Connor

K. C. Baral

D. Venkat Rao

Samskara: A Critical Reader is the first volume of its kind to be published on one of the classics of Indian literatures. It includes two foundation essays by Anantha Murthy, one on Indian fiction and the other on how he wrote Samskara, offering a historical context to the volume. Other essays, besides tracing the novel's roots to the tradition of realism in Indian fiction, address textual issues such as the representations of colonial modernity, thematic issues such as brahminism and the caste system, cultural issues such as gender and epistemic contestations, probing the depth and complexity of the work from a broad range of contemporary theoretical perspectives. Two essays focusing on the novel's translation into other languages and adaptation for radio add new dimensions to the interpretation of the novel.

Sura Prasad Rath

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