While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence. "Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul," O'Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism Nietzche's idea that "God is dead" preoccupied O'Connor, and she...
While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosoph...
The Fugitive-Agrarians were an influential literary group that began at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s. Although the philosophically driven alliance was short-lived, two of its members, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, went on to become influential Southern poets and theorists. In this work, a self-proclaimed third-generation Fugitive-Agrarian concentrates on the history and mystery of nature. The author supports the recovery of fundamental principles required for the economic, social and political health of our communities. He explores Fugitive-Agrarian concepts of nature, history,...
The Fugitive-Agrarians were an influential literary group that began at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s. Although the philosophically driven allian...
Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends but very different writers, even though both were from the Deep South and intensely interested in the relation of place to their fiction. This work explores in each the concept of home and the importance of home to the homo viator ("man on his way"), and anti-idealism and anti-romanticism. The differences between Welty and Percy and in their fiction were revealed in the habits of their lives. Welty spent her life in Jackson, Mississippi, and was very much a member of the community. Percy was a wanderer who finally settled in Covington,...
Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends but very different writers, even though both were from the Deep South and intensely interested in the relat...
In this companion volume to Romantic Confusions of the Good (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), distinguished scholar Marion Montgomery continues his exploration of Romantic poetry, including that of Eliot, Pound, Keats, Donne, Wordsworth, and Williams, from a Thomistic perspective. Of particular interest to Montgomery are intellect and its relation to reality, intuition and rational thought, analogy, and attribution. This is a valuable addition to the literature on Romantic poetry.
In this companion volume to Romantic Confusions of the Good (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), distinguished scholar Marion Montgomery continues his explor...
This brilliantly allusive and gracefully written study is focused on T. S. Eliot's developing commitment to Christianity, but the essay is by no means procrustean or reductive in its strategies, nor is it theological.
Montgomery shows how Eliot's intellectual and emotional uneasiness in the early poems is reflected in such technical devices as point of view and imagery. The questions of the poem's voice and the poet's mask (which are often ironic in nature) become less pressing as time goes on, and finally Eliot comes to a dynamic stillness--a frozen point in the sea of change that is...
This brilliantly allusive and gracefully written study is focused on T. S. Eliot's developing commitment to Christianity, but the essay is by no me...
In this volume, Marion Montgomery ponders two very different varieties of possum as the starting point for a literary, philosophical, and poetic inquiry into the nature of Southernness. The first possum is the familiar marsupial, native to the American South, in whose modest status can be seen an image of the lowly ground to which all our dreams must remain anchored. The second possum is the first-person singular present of the Latin verb posse; rendered as "I am able," this possum embodies the movement in which men, since the Old Adam, have elevated themselves beyond their estate, taking...
In this volume, Marion Montgomery ponders two very different varieties of possum as the starting point for a literary, philosophical, and poetic in...
This book embodies a sequence of closely related essays which explore the modern poet's uneasy awareness of a tradition-the romantic tradition-with which he must contend. The author's premise is that the romantic age extends from "The Divine Comedy" through Wordsworth to Eliot. The roots of contemporary questions about the self and alienation are seen to extend at least as far back as Dante, who is the first poet to choose the ego as a focus for poetry of epic dimensions.
In the course of the study Montgomery considers the growing emphasis upon the self's becoming the focus of poetry...
This book embodies a sequence of closely related essays which explore the modern poet's uneasy awareness of a tradition-the romantic tradition-with...
With special attention to the Romantic poets from Wordsworth and Coleridge down to Pound and Eliot, distinguished scholar Marion Montgomery explores the disorientation of image and metaphor from reality. The book focuses on the virtues and limits of the intuitive intellect as they are explicated by Thomas Aquinas in relational intellect, and the 'Romantic' poet's dependence upon the intuitive and rational modes of intellectual action, two species of 'romanticism' centering in presumptuous autonomy emerge: that of the poet and that of the scientist.
With special attention to the Romantic poets from Wordsworth and Coleridge down to Pound and Eliot, distinguished scholar Marion Montgomery explores t...
