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    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"
    Ebook45 pages38 minutes

    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535840330
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"

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      A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away" - Gale

      1

      The Violent Bear It Away

      Flannery O'Connor

      1960

      Introduction

      The Violent Bear It Away, published in New York in 1960, is Flannery O'Connor's darkly humorous Gothic novel about a Southern boy's spiritual awakening. It charts the spiritual and physical journey of fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater, raised by his great-uncle in the backwoods of Alabama to be a prophet. Tarwater travels to the city, where he struggles against the need to deny his spiritual inheritance and the call of God. O'Connor paints a macabre picture of Southern life and religious fundamentalism and parodies the blind self-assurances of modern secular thinking. The novel is unsettling because it offers no easy truths; its hero is an unlikable boy who learns that doing God's work entails violence, unreason, even madness. It is not, as might be expected, a parody of religious fanaticism, but a psychological study of the mysterious, frightening, and sometimes offensive nature of the religious calling. Stark religious symbolism and Biblical allusions unite to explore themes of spiritual hunger, faith versus reason, and the battle for the soul. O'Connor wrote the novel over eight years while suffering from lupus, publishing the first chapter as a story, You Can't Be Poorer Than Dead, in 1955. Her last major work to be published in her lifetime, The Violent Bear It Away contains elements found in much of O'Connor's fiction. Her only other novel, Wise Blood (1952), fuses humor and horror to examine questions of faith, suffering, family relationships, and intellectual versus religious understanding. The novel was not particularly well received when it first appeared; many critics found it strange and impenetrable. But, to some extent because of O'Connor's reputation as a master of the short story, the novel is now considered an important work in the Gothic tradition and acknowledged to be O'Connor's best work of longer fiction.

      Author Biography

      Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a middle-class Catholic family. Her father was a realtor who had once had literary ambitions, and her mother came from a prominent Georgia political family. From an early age O'Connor, a shy and quiet girl, had literary aspirations, which were encouraged by her father; at the age of six she began writing and illustrating her own stories. In 1938, the O'Connor family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's hometown, after her father showed symptoms of lupus. O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she contributed drawings and articles to the school newspaper and submitted short stories to literary journals.

      In 1940 O'Connor's father died, and she and her mother moved to her mother's family farm, Andalusia. After graduating in 1945 from the Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College), where she edited the college newspaper and literary magazine, O'Connor enrolled in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. At Iowa, she was mentored by Paul Engle, the director of the program, and made

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