Publication Date

5-1970

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Frank Steele, William Wood, Will Fridy

Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

Since the death of Carson McCullers in 1967, there has been no revival of interest in her work, and there has been little critical study done in regard to it. All of McCullers' stories have Southern settings, and most are set in her native Georgia. She uses folk materials (as do Faulkner, Welty and Warren), but the limitations which these impose are transcended, and the fiction becomes an "examination of universal moral circumstances."1 McCullers does not exploit local color, which, as Robert Penn Warren has noted, is often "incomplete and unphilosophical."2 Rather than treating locale for its own sake, she uses it, as do many other Southern writers, as a means of dramatizing themes which are universal. Previous studies have included those done in regard to the Southern settings of McCullers' novels, her use of musical structure, and the Gothic elements in her fiction. There has been, however, no study of paradox as that skeleton around which the novels are structured. This thesis will focus on some paradoxical elements of the fiction of Carson McCullers; these will be limited to two motifs: the eye and the quest, and two themes: love-hate and community-isolation.

1. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Art of Southern Fiction: A Study of Some Modern Novelists (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 11.

2. Robert Penn Warren, "Not Local Color," The Virginia Quarterly Review, VIII (January 1932), 154.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America

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