In any age, humans wrestle with apparently inexorable forces. Today, we face the threat of global terrorism. In the aftermath of September 11, few could miss sensing that a great evil was
at work in the world. In Flannery O��onnor�� time, the threats came from different sources��orld War II, the Cold War, and the Korean conflict��ut they were just as real. She, too, lived
though a ��ime of terror.��The first major critical volume on Flannery O��onnor�� work in more than a decade, Flannery O��onnor in the Age of Terrorism explores issues of violence, evil,
and terror��hemes that were never far from O��onnor�� reach and that seem particularly relevant to our present-day setting.
The fifteen essays collected here offer a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction
abounds in violence. Written by both established and emerging scholars, the pieces that editors Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo have selected offer a compelling and varied picture of this
iconic author and her work. Included are comparisons of O��onnor to 1950s writers of noir literature and to the contemporary American novelist Cormac McCarthy; cultural studies that draw on
horror comics of the Cold War and on Fordism and the American mythos of the automobile; and pieces that shed new light on O��onnor�� complex religious sensibility and its role in her
work.
While continuing to speak fresh truths about her own time, O��onnor�� fiction also resonates deeply with the postmodern sensibilities of audiences increasingly distant from her era��eaders
absorbed in their own terrors and sense of looming, ineffable threats. This provocative new collection presents O��onnor�� work as a touchstone for understanding where our culture has been
and where we are now. With its diverse approaches, Flannery O��onnor in the Age of Terrorism will prove useful not only to scholars and students of literature but to anyone
interested in history, popular culture, theology, and reflective writing.
