SOURCE: "Everything That Rises Must Converge: O'Connor's Seven-Story Cycle," in Renascence, Vol. XLII, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 187-212.

In the following essay, Winn asserts that O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge is a short story cycle in which "O'Connor varies the location of her limited omniscient point of view and interweaves parallel thematic patterns to link together the seven stories."

In modern fiction, writers have combined the aesthetics of the novel and the short story to construct grouping of interrelated stories that are too finely patterned to be described as a mere collection of stories and too dependent on individual components to be described as a novel. Among the names proposed for this new genre, Forrest Ingram's suggestion of "short story cycle" in Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century most clearly represents its nature. He defines a short story cycle as "a book of short stories so...