Desire, Violence, & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy

by Gary M. Ciuba

In this study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction - Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy - expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic Rene Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model.

Genres: Nonfiction

287 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jenny Webb]

Useful and well written. More like 3.5 stars. I wanted the author to take his connections further, and at times the analysis was bogged down in complex plot lines, but that's partly due to the nature of the authors he was discussing.

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Fascinating Girardian reading; unnecessarily obtuse prose.