New in paper
Understanding Eudora Welty
Michael Kreyling
Understanding Eudora Welty provides close readings of Welty’s novels and short stories
and the memoir One Writer’s Beginnings. Michael Kreyling sifts through contemporary
reviews and recent criticism in arriving at his assessment. Noting that Welty’s work has
been before the public and in the minds of literary critics for nearly a half century, he
suggests that understanding the critical history of her canon is almost as important as
understanding the works themselves. As he considers the many assessments and reassessments of Welty’s work, Kreyling uncovers and discusses the myriad identities that
critics have attached to her—Southern writer, southern gothicist, “Southern Renaissance”
writer, modernist, and feminist. Questioning the sufficiency of any single label, Kreyling
suggests that Welty never wrote to a formula and never wrote the same story twice. Kreyling maps the dynamic growth Welty exhibited in the depth and complexity of her vision
and literary technique over the course of her career.
Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Matthew J. Bruccoli, founding series editor
Michael Kreyling is a professor of
English at Vanderbilt University. He is
editor of the Library of America editions of Eudora Welty’s works and the
author of Eudora Welty’s Achievement of
Order, Author and Agent: Eudora Welty
and Diarmuid Russell, and other books
on Southern literature.
April 2011, 272 pages
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