The terror of gentility: Race, class and gendered anti-modernism in the works of Isak Dinesen and Flannery O'Connor (Denmark)

In broad terms, this project addresses the problem of the conservative woman writer in the twentieth century, that is, the ideological and aesthetic tension that arises when one of the subject positions historically cast as one of victimhood by progressive thought is occupied by anti-progressive voices. This tension pervades the evolution of habitual modes of literary theory and interpretation, which seek resolution of inherent contradiction and apparent illogic in conservative women's writing through regular reexamination and re-reading. As twentieth century literary figures, Isak Dinesen and Flannery O'Connor embody this aesthetic and critical conundrum due to their comparable stations as respected, eccentric grandes dames of modern letters whose work and personae wrestle with modernity's upheaval and erosion of conservative, aristocratic values. Moreover, both writers employ dark humor and semi-irony in a rhetorical strategy of ideological camouflage, masking and tempering what I contend are fundamentally reactionary, anti-progressive worldviews. Furthermore, I argue that humor and irony notwithstanding, Dinesen and O'Connor provide valuable test cases for tracking recent "postmodernist," "postfeminist" trends in cultural studies, one in a European context and one in an American context. Methodologically, I realign the textual, biographical and historico-political planes relevant to each author in order to provide an internal and external analysis of the intersections of author/text/context. Working within a historicist framework that resides between the literary and the worldly, this project closely scrutinizes key fictional and non-fictional texts by both writers, with attention to the evolving critical reception to Dinesen and O'Connor.