Desire, Violence, & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor...

Книга "Desire, Violence, & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy". In this groundbreaking 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 René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they [link] a comprehensive...