Research Findings

I think I'm going to be looking at religion, specifically the grace moment when "a stranger comes to town" in O'Connor. For this I'll probably be focusing on The Violent Bear It Away, "A Good Man", "The Life You Save", "The River", and "Good Country People". (If anyone can think of a story I've missed that loosely fits that "stranger" criteria, I'd love to be let in on the secret.)

From my raid on the library, I found:

Edward Kessler's Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse (1986)
Ralph C. Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004), containing old favorites like "The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region" and "Demonic Nihilism: The Chief Moral Temptation of Modernity"
Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction (2007), from eds. extraordinaire JH McMullen and JP Peede

And on a preliminary run-through on jstor I recovered Bob Dowell's "The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor" and Thelma J. Shin's "Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace"