The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor", which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work. Drawing largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute, this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring fourteen new essays, Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor disrupts a few commonplace assumptions of O'Connor studies while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention. The volume opens with "New Methodologies", which features theoretical approaches not typically associated with O'Connor's fiction in order to gain new insights into her work. The second section, "New Contexts", stretches expectations on literary genre, on popular archetypes in her stories, and on how we should interpret her work. The third section, lovingly called "Strange Bedfellows", puts O'Connor in dialogue with overlooked or neglected conversation partners, while the final section, "O'Connor's Legacy", reconsiders her personal views on creative writing and her wishes regarding the handling of her estate upon death. With these final essays, the collection comes full circle, attesting to the hazards that come from overly relying on O'Connor's interpretation of her own work but also from ignoring her views and desires. Through these reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the vitality of scholarship on Flannery O'Connor.

Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South. Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Complexities of race, class, and gender remain hidden amid familiar images, catchy slogans, and convenient stories. As the first collection of scholarship that investigates the relationship between drinking and the South, Southern Comforts challenges popular assumptions by examining evocative topics drawn from literature, music, film, city life, and cocktail culture. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate that exaggerated representations of drinking oversimplify the South's relationship to alcohol, in effect absorbing it into narratives of southern exceptionalism that persist to this day. From Edgar Allan Poe to Richard Wright, Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash, Bourbon Street tourism to post-Katrina disaster capitalism and more, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South uncovers the reciprocal relationship between mythologies of drinking and mythologies of region.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor", which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work. Drawing largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute, this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring fourteen new essays, Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor disrupts a few commonplace assumptions of O'Connor studies while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention. The volume opens with "New Methodologies", which features theoretical approaches not typically associated with O'Connor's fiction in order to gain new insights into her work. The second section, "New Contexts", stretches expectations on literary genre, on popular archetypes in her stories, and on how we should interpret her work. The third section, lovingly called "Strange Bedfellows", puts O'Connor in dialogue with overlooked or neglected conversation partners, while the final section, "O'Connor's Legacy", reconsiders her personal views on creative writing and her wishes regarding the handling of her estate upon death. With these final essays, the collection comes full circle, attesting to the hazards that come from overly relying on O'Connor's interpretation of her own work but also from ignoring her views and desires. Through these reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the vitality of scholarship on Flannery O'Connor.