In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction -- Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy -- expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic Rene Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of...

In "Walker Percy: Books of Revelations," Gary M. Ciuba examines how Percy's apocalyptic vision inspires the structure, themes, and strategies of his fiction. This book explores the unity of the southern novelist's fiction by focusing on its religious and artistic design--one of the first studies to approach Percy's work from this perspective.

Ciuba considers Percy's six published novels--"The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome"--and also offers the first extended critical analysis of his unpublished work "The Gramercy...