Top: Book cover. Below: Alison Arant
Congratulations to Wagner College English professor Alison Arant, co-editor of “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” just published by the University Press of Mississippi. Arant also contributed material to the collection.
The book was co-edited with Jordan Cofer, associate provost and professor of English at Georgia College.
The project arose from two Summer Institutes titled “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O’Connor’s work.
“Featuring fourteen new essays, this collection disrupts a few commonplace assumptions of O’Connor studies while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention,” says the publisher.
Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina and author of “The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor” and “The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950,” offered his assessment of the new collection:
Alison Arant and Jordan Cofer’s collection of essays, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” stands as a major achievement, presenting a number of provocative new ways to interpret O’Connor and her work, mostly by younger scholars whose work here establishes them as important voices in O’Connor criticism. Impeccably edited, the volume is a treasure trove for both general readers and seasoned critics of O’Connor, the essays consistently invigorating and enlightening.
Alison Arant joined the Wagner College community in 2013 after earning her doctorate from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, with a dissertation titled, “That Rotten Richness: Old Maids and Reproductive Anxiety in U.S. Southern Fiction, 1923-1946.” She earned her M.A. from Creighton University (Omaha, Neb.) and her B.A. cum laude from John Brown University (Siloam Springs, Ark.).
Arant is currently an associate professor who serves as chair of Wagner College’s English Department and interim director of the Gender Studies minor. She teaches and publishes on topics related to U.S. literature and culture, the American South, African American literature, women’s literature, and race and music studies.
Arant’s work has appeared in the Flannery O’Connor Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly and Southern Literary Journal. Earlier this year her essay, “Mama Likes Her Gin: Black Blues Women, Freedom and Alcohol in the Prohibition South,” was published in the collection, “Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South,” by Louisiana State University Press.