Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies

<p>In Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies Carol Shloss moves from biographical thematic and theological approaches and instead focuses her criticism on the successes and failures of O'Connor as a rhetorician.<br />This valuable study of O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole distortion allusion analogy the dramatization of extreme religious experience the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice and direct address to the reader.<br />Schloss aims to return Flannery O'Connor to her readers on fathomable terms to offer a rhetorical rather than theological perspective from which to understand the country preachers square-jawed farm wives wise rubes foolish intellectuals huckster Bible salesmen killers and other "good country people" who populate O'Connor's fiction.</p>