In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Walker Percy, expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -and sometimes ritually sanctified-victimization of those deemed outcasts.