Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor

In Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Louise Westling explores how the complex, difficult roles of women in southern culture shaped the literary worlds of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Tracing the cultural heritage of the South, Westling shows how southern women reacted to the violent, false world created by their men--a world in which women came to be shrouded as icons of purity in atonement for the sins of men. Exposing the actual conditions of women's lives, creating assertive protagonists who resist or revise conventional roles, and exploring rich matriarchal traditions and connections to symbolic landscapes Welty, McCullers, and O'Connor created a body of fiction that enriches and complements the patriarchal version of southern life presented in the works of William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and William Styron.

Author: Louise Westling
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 09/01/2008
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.53d
ISBN: 9780820332024

About the Author
Louise Westling is a professor of English at the University of Oregon. Her books include "The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction" (Georgia).