flannery oconner: queen of irony Essay -- essays research papers

Flannery OConnor Queen of jeeringThe literary rebellion, known as realism, established itself in Ameri faecal matter authorship as a direct response to the age of American love storys sentimental and sensationalist prose. As the dominance of New Englands literary finale waned a host of new writers appeared, among them Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and shop Twain, whose background and training, unlike those of the older generation they displaced, were middle-class and journalistic or else than genteel or academic (McMichael 6). These authors moved from tales of local color illustration to realistic and truthful depictions of the complete panorama of American experience. They wrote about unambiguously American subjects in a humorous and everyday language, replete with their computer addresss misdeeds and shortcomings. Their success in creating this plain but descriptive language, the language of the common musical composition, signaled the end of American reverence for British and European culture and for the more formal use of language associated with those traditions. In essence, these new authors had what the author henry James called a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life, in contrast to the romanticists insistence on the authors rights to avoid representations of squalid misery and to present instead an idealized and poetic portrait of life (McMichael 6). In contrast to their romantic and realist predecessors, the literary natural scientists emphasise that the world was amoral, that men and women had no freewill, that their lives were controlled by hereditary and the environment, that religious truths were illusory, and that the great deal of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in expiry (McMichael 7). The naturalist writer Stephen Crane, for instance, explored the absurdity of the human condition. His writing most a good deal portrayed humanity as lonesome singular entities relying on their on trial belief in the benevolence of God and freewill, led by their firm illusions of being the center of the universe, and clueless to the disparity between their greatest expectations and their equalizing bouts of impendent doom. These realist and naturalist writers, with their revolutionary new method of portraying humanity as opened of evil and as likely victims of an often tempestuous environment or seemingly spiteful heredity, were a powerful influence on... ...pocrisies of her southern environment. In the last year of her life OConnor wrote, You write. . ., what you can. And you become, we can further infer, what you can (Fitzgerald xix).It was the civil rights leader Martin Luther King who said, The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at multiplication of challenge and controversy. Faced with a sure knowledge of impending goal from an incurable disease and a South blinded by its hypocrisies and lies, Flannery OConnor challenged th e mores and conventions of her time to emerge a literary visionary and a lawful example of the best that American literature has to offer. The author used the everyday locution of the South as easily, and as maliciously, as it often occurs there, among blacks and whites kindred (Fitzgerald xix). She spit into the wind of amorality and sin the consequences be damned despite the situation that in her time she was an outsider as a women, a southerner, and a Roman Catholic in the South. Her natural gifts produced the fiction, but her situation gave them opportunities, and enabled her to exercise her intelligence, imagination, and craftsmanship most effectively (Hyman 46).