Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O'Connor, St. Thomas, and the Limits of Art, Vol. 1

In the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas, the writings of Flannery O’Connor’s concern for place can best be seen in the immediacies of things and persons. It is in relation to St. Thomas’ teaching, then, that O’Connor becomes comfortable in her “place,” Andalusia, that small farm just outside the small town of Milledgeville in middle Georgia. The abiding relationship between place—Andalusia or elsewhere—and a person comes out of human nature itself, evidenced in a person’s experiences of things in this place at this time. With that as background, this detailed analysis of O’Connor’s works lays to rest the author’s own self-deprecating description of herself as a “hillbilly” Thomist. Instead we see in O’Connor’s writing a highly sophisticated mind, an inconvenience to the many critics who dismiss her as anti-intellectual. “Readers...will be rewarded in reading [Montgomery]”—Modern Age; “I regard Marion Montgomery as one of the most acute and profound critics of present-day American culture. He brings to his discussion of it penetrating insight and solid scholarship.”—Cleanth Brooks. The book is published as a set of two volumes. Replacement volumes can be obtained individually under ISBN 0786426268 (for Volume 1) and ISBN 078642627-6 (for Volume 2).