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 Through these reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the vitality of scholarship on Flannery O'Connor.

This new assessment of a major southern writer's work offers a revisionist view of her characters, who in the past twenty-five years of critical attention too often and too easily have been labeled grotesque. O'Connor's stories and novels are usually considered mere dramatizations of her stated orthodox religious commitments. According to the predominant view, the typical O'Connor work consists of a set of corrupt characters and an authoritative narrator who analyzes their theological errors. When redemption occurs, according to this view, it results from forces outside the character and against that character's will. Although such a reading adequately describes a few works, it misunderstands O'Connor's general handling of narration and of characterization. Marshall Bruce Gentry proposes new positions on O'Connor's narration and on the role of the grotesque in her characterization. By investigating the nature of religious experience in her works, he concludes that O'Connor's primary interest is redemption achieved by grotesque and unconscious means. Often in O'Connor's works, redemption becomes a moment of freedom in a continuing process of degradation and reformation. The real focus of O'Connor's fiction is the grotesque path toward redemption. As Gentry points out, by sending themselves toward physical annihilation, her characters typically take control of their redemption.

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.