Hillbilly Thomist

The late Marion Montgomery was professor emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. In 2003, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honored Montgomery with the Gerhart Niemeyer Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship in Liberal Arts. He lived in Crawford, Georgia.

“engaging...readers...will be rewarded in reading [Montgomery]”—Modern Age; “a monumental book”—The Charlotte World; “massive work”—First Things; “I regard Marion Montgomery as one of the most acute and profound critics of present-day American culture. He brings to his discussion of it penetrating insight and solid scholarship.”—Cleanth Brooks.

• Table of ContentsVolume 1Acknowledgments      Preface      1. Settling In at Andalusia      2. In Company with Good Country People      3. Glimpsing a Peacock’s Underwear      4. From Lethe to the Mississippi: Shall We Gather at the River?      5. Sorting Truth at the Surface of Things      6. At Risk in the Wilderness of Theory      7. Out of Essential Displacement, Toward a Felt Balance      8. Miss Flannery in Cahoots with the Devil      9. Coincidence of the Moral and Dramatic Senses      10. The Intellectual Air We Breathe in Skating the Surfaces      11. The Cannibal of Thought: Modernist Theory      12. Getting Dusty, Even Muddy, in the Swamp of the Self      13. Moral and Dramatic Problematics of Metaphor      Volume 214. The Poet and His Implied Attitude      15. Writing about the Whole World: The Challenge of the Local to Reason in Making      16. Reason Seeking Answering Reason in Things: The Philosopher as Poet, the Poet as Philosopher      17. Connecting Two Points—Two Countries—with Images      18. Uncertain Images, Entangling Metaphors: The Long Pursuit of Meaning      19. The Sentimentality of Being Half in Love with Easeful Death      20. The Mystery of Form: Discovering the Word in Our Words      21. Homo Viator on the Threshold of the Far Country: Here, Now, Always      22. His Presence in Things, Our Fingerprints on Words      23. Our Pursuit of Nothingness, Artifice as Idol      Afterword      Appendix A: Eric Voegelin and Flannery O’Connor on the Disjunction of Grace and Nature      Appendix B: Concerning Thomistic Epistemology      Appendix C: Concerning Thomas’ “Principle of Proper Proportionality”      Appendix D: Concerning O’Connor’s Fictional Strategy of Indirection      Appendix E: Concerning the Artist and Prudential Humility      Chapter Notes [for both volumes]      Selected Bibliography      Index