A Circle in the Fire Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 57 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A Circle in the Fire.

A Circle in the Fire Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 57 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A Circle in the Fire.
This section contains 476 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the A Circle in the Fire Study Guide

"A Circle in the Fire" has drawn scarce critical comment as an individual story, but O'Connor's short fiction has been widely reviewed and analyzed as a whole. In the 1950s and 1960s when most of O'Connor's stories were first published, opinions of her work varied. Many critics and scholars immediately recognized that her work dealt with universal themes in a highly individual way and felt it would have lasting appeal. Others reviewers, however, criticized the stories for their grotesqueness and insisted that O'Connor was merely a regional writer of passing interest. As time has passed, respect for O'Connor's work has grown, and her early admirers have proved prescient.

In a 1965 review of O'Connor's collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, critic Irving Howe writes in the New York Review of Books that O'Connor's stories

stand securely on their own, as renderings and criticisms of human experience. And...

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This section contains 476 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the A Circle in the Fire Study Guide
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