Church W/O the Church: Desert Orthodoxy in Flannery O'Connor's Dear Old Dirty Southland

Series: Flannery O'Connor

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O'Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O'Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the "Southern Gothic" trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O'Connor as essen