The church without the church : desert orthodoxy in Flannery O\u27Connor\u27s Dear Old Dirty Southland

THESIS 9628In the nearly fifty years since her death, the critical study of the life and work of Mary Flannery O\u27Connor has been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the greater "South" and the Church of Rome. My research challenges the longstanding conception of O\u27Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism. My first chapter, "Monsters, Monoliths, and Middle Georgia: Flannery O\u27Connor and the \u27Dear Old Dirty Southland,\u27" contextualizes O\u27Connor\u27s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the "North" and "South" as well as problematising the notion of region-specific aesthetics, notably American/Non-Southern realism and Southern Gothicism. My second chapter, "\u27One jesus [is] Just as Bad as Another\u27: Orthodoxy as Ecumenical Blasphemy in the Fiction of Flannery O\u27Connor," contests the body of scholarship which attempts to explain O\u27Connor\u27s work in terms of Roman orthodoxy