Finding Religion: The Legacy of the Christ-haunted South in Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes

My thesis proposes that Flannery O’Connor’s character the Misfit of the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Joe Lon Mackey, the protagonist of Harry Crews’ novel A Feast of Snakes (1976), share a significant connection that manifests from their upbringing in what O’Connor calls the “Christ-haunted South.” This thesis attempts to create a working interpretation of O’Connor’s phrase “Christ-haunted South” and juxtapose it against the “Christ-centered” alternative. By defining these terms and using Luke Ferretter’s work Towards a Christian Literary Theory as a guide, it intends to explore the texts’ Christian elements to facilitate a better understanding of the culture in which the stories take place and offer instructive criticisms of Christian communities, especially those that have reduced Christianity to mere ideology or spectacle. Specifically, it seeks to establish the Misfit’s struggle as a prototype of the Southern man who exposes the negative ramifications of the “Christ-haunted South.” Furthermore, it examines similar religious implications in A Feast of Snakes, and it suggests that Joe Lon struggles, like the Misfit, to obtain any type of transcendence in the “Christ-haunted” South. This alternative analysis reveals a gap in the current criticism of this text by highlighting the significance of Christian undertones in the novel. Thus, it expressly acknowledges that religion is an integral component of Southern culture and should therefore be addressed in the criticism of its literature, and it implies the need for the examinations of the breadth and depth of theological tropes in modern American literature as a whole. **Keywords:** ReligionChapter I. INTRODUCTION 1 | Chapter II. The Prototype in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” 16 | Chapter III. The Misfit of Mystic 32 | Chapter IV. CONCLUSION 54 | REFERENCES 59 |Williams, MartyBuehrer, DavidJames, ChristineK da Cruz, BeckyM.A.Englis