CHAPTER-I
INTRODUCTION
In her introduction to A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
(1941), Katherine Anne Porter quotes Eudora Welty as having
commented: “I haven’t led a literary life at all... But I do feel that the
people and things I love are of a true and human world, and there is
no clutter about them.”1 Indeed, through more than a half centuiy of
writing short stories, novels, criticism, and autobiography, Welty has
consistently presented her readers with fundamental truths and
essential humanity, all the while avoiding the clutter of fads, fancies,
ideologies and inanities. Like her nineteenth century literary
progenitor, Robert Browning, she has focused on the human soul in
action, developing dramatic moments of character in which the
speakers and actors typically reveal far more than they realize. Like
her twentieth century Mississippi neighbour William Faulkner, she
has been especially interested in “the human heart in conflict with
itself.”
No full-length biography has been written and, for the time
being at least, the chronology in Ruth Vande Kieft’s Eudora Welty
(1962; 1987), used in conjunction with the anecdotal reminiscences of
the autobiographical one, Writer’s Beginnings (1984) provides
essential biographical highlights.2
Welty has, however, been gracious and relatively open in
granting interviews for publication, twenty-six of which are collected
in Peggy W.Prenshaw’s Conversations with Eudora Welty (1984).
Her
literary
papers,
manuscripts,
literary
correspondences,
unpublished writings, and so forth are collected primarily in two
repositories: the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in
Jackson and the Haiy Ransom Humanities Research Center of the
University of Texas at Austin. Much of the correspondence, however,
remains in private hands, and other collected letters and manuscripts
are scattered about in colleges and universities throughout the United
States.
Biographical aids for the Welty study begin with Noel Polk’s A
Eudora Welty Checklistpublished in a special Welty issue of
Mississippi Quarterly in 1973, which includes the most extensive
listing of her works up to that year.4 Victor H.Thompson’s Eudora
Welty: A
Reference
Guide
(1976)
offers
a
comprehensive
compilation of secondary materials, including reviews from 1936 to
1976 of Welty’s fiction, as well as listings of biographical materials
and of her non-fiction, exclusive of reviews.5 Updates of Polk’s
“Checklist” have periodically appeared in The Eudora Welty
Newsletter.
2
Peggy W.Prenshaw has prepared the most useful and
important descriptive
bibliography to-date American
Women
Writers: Bibliographical Essays (1983).6 Helpful in tracking Welty’s
early reputation, Bethany C. Swearingen’s Eudora Welty: A Critical
Bibliography 1936-1958 (1984) presents a complete annotated listing
of primaiy and secondary sources for that period.7 A more recent
updating of Polk’s 1973 “Checklist” is Pearl Amelia Me Haney’s A
Eudora Welty Checklist: 1973-1986.”8
The first, and in many ways still the most important, full-length
study of Welty’s work is Ruth M. Vande Kieft’s Eudora Welty,
originally published in 1962 as part of Twaynes’ United States
Authors Series. In it, Vande Kieft established the standard work
against which all later studies have been measured. She attempts to
convey the inner life of Welty’s fiction by offering a series of careful
and telling interpretive readings, drawing on Robert Pen Warren’s
seminal essay, “The Love and the Separateness in Miss Welty.”9
Vande Kieft stresses the ingredients of dualities of experience,
experimentation and lyricism in Welty’s works. She calls attention to
great variety, both of form and content, in the fiction, and proceeds to
examine most of what have become the standard points of critical
3
discussion: the importance of place, the evolving technical virtuosity,
the use of comedy, dream, and fantasy, and the ability to arrive at the
universal. Finally, Vande Kieft attempts to trace patterns of
relationships among the various works. In 1987, Vande Kieft offered
a revised and updated edition that includes analysis of Welty’s work
since 1962, as well as a substantially revised chapter on The Bride of
the Innisfallen.
Michael Kreyling, in his Eudora Welty’s Achievement of
Order (1980), shifts the focus to technique as the unifying force in
Welty’s fiction.10 Continuing the emphasis on her work as more
lyrical than narrative, Kreyling moves behind close interpretive
readings of individual works and beyond the tracing of regional,
mythological, and folk roots in an attempt to identify the unique voice
that characterizes Welty’s art. In this first full-length study to include
discussion of her work through The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), he
traces Welty’s growth in artistic sensibility into what he considers her
most encompassing Losing Battles (1970). Kreyling’s sensitive
approach offers an intelligent and stimulating counter balance to
Vande Kieft’s more analytical criticism.
4
Drawing on Welty’s own insistence upon the importance of
place working on the author’s imagination, Albert Delvin’s Eudora
Welty’s Chronicle (1983) attempts to clarify and trace the historical
aesthetic in her fiction as it is rooted in her home state of
Mississippi.11 Delvin finds an essential underlying cultural unity in
the fiction that is informed by the cumulative effect of her historical
imagination. Agreeing with Kreyling that formalist and mythological
readings do not closely enough approach Welty’s over-riding vision,
he posits that “The intense subjectivity that Welty portrays in her
most characteristic work may indeed be historic in origin.” After
mapping Welty’s Mississippi Chronicle from the beginnings of the
territory to the present day, Devlin concludes by sketching her literary
kinship with modernist writers such as Yeats, Joyce, and Virginia
Woolf.
A number of other book and monograph length studies of
Welty’s work have also appeared. Alfred J. Appel, Jr., published
A Season of Dreams (1965) as the first volume in Louisiana State
University Press Southern Literary Series.12
It is a highly derivative book based heavily on Vande Kieft and
several other important essays, such as Warren’s “Love and
5
Separateness.” Marie Antonette Manz-Kunz presented a very uneven
study - at times provocative, at time mundane - in her Eudora Welty:
Aspects of Reality in Her Short Fiction (1971). Zelma Turner
Howard’s The Rhetoric of Eudora Welty’s Short Stories (1973)
applies Wayne Booth’s techniques in fiction. A Tissue of Lies:
Eudora Welty and the Southern Romance (1982) by Jennifer Lynn
Randisi locates Welty in the tradition of Southern Romance Writing,
particularly stressing the importance of place in her work. Carol Sue
Mannings with Ears Opening like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty
and the Love of Story Telling (1985) stresses Welty’s love for story
telling as the basis for her extensive and comic depiction of the
South’s oral culture. Though not focusing exclusively on Welty,
Louise Welty, Carson Me Cullers and Flannery O’ Connor (1985)
traces the traditions of Southern Womanhood and their impact on the
fiction of the three writers. Her chapter on Welty is perhaps her most
successful at demonstrating her thesis but she considers in detail only
Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples and The Optimist’s Daughter,13
Place, for Eudora Welty, is just as important as character and
plot. This statement, a few generations ago, would have been
meaningless, since no novelist would have thought of telling a story
without reference to a location. But with the general uprooting of life,
6
and with a growing subjectivity in art whereby characters are more
likely to talk than act, Miss Welty’s statement has acquired a special
importance. Southern writers, even the most modem ones, however
have never been deficient in attaching its due significance to place. If
anything, they may be said to be too much place-conscious. The
peculiar history of the south has made the southerner place-conscious.
With him place becomes almost an important aspect of fiction, and to
the advantage of his art.
Discussing Eudora Welty’s rendering of place, Paul Binding
says that it is a very individual blend of the objective and the
subjective, of the precise and the atmospheric, of the detached and the
involved.14 She can evoke places very different from her own south.
Like many of her generation, she learned from Faulkner the
advantage of putting to a literary use that which is near and familiar.
She is more deliberate than Faulkner in her use of the regionally
distinct and perhaps lays a greater burden on the reader from the
outside. But with her devotion to the small and the inconsequential in
daily life, she is in some respects even closer to the heart-beat of her
region. Faulkner is concerned with men and ideas and the course of
history. Eudora Welty is most at home in a domestic situation where
people talk about something and stand still in a particular place.
7
The art of rendering a place as handled by Miss Welty seems to
have qualities of the photographer’s art with the difference that it is a
sensate account lyrically depicted which she reveals through her
stories like “The ‘Bride of the Innisfallen’ and ‘Music from Spain’”.
The scenes are often set in the south. Welty’s narrative art is seen to
the fullest extent in these scenic descriptions. Natchez Trace in winter
is depicted as follows:
The coated moss hung in blue and shining
garlands over the trees .along the changed
streets in the morning. The town of little
galleries was all laden roofs and silence. In
the fastness of Natchez it began to see them
that the whole world, like itself, must be in
transfiguration. The only clamour came
from the animals that suffered in their stalls,
or from the wild cats that howled in closure
rings from the Frozen Cane. The Indians
could be heard from greater distances and in
greater numbers than had been guessed,
sending up placating but proud messages to
the sun in continual ceremonies of dancing.
The red percussion of their fire could be
seen night and day by those waiting in the
dark trace of the Frozen town. Men were
caught by the cold, they dropped in the
snare like silence. Bands of travelers moved
8
closer together, with
intenser caution,
through the glassy tunnels of the trace, for
all proportion went away and they followed
one another like insects going at dawn
through the heavy grass. Natchez people
turned silently to look when a solitary man
that no one had ever seen before was found
and carried in through the streets, frozen the
way he had crouched in a hallow tree, green
and huddled like a squirrel, with a little
bundle of goods clasped to him.15
The above passage shows Eudora Welty’s capacity for
juxtapositions which contribute to compression and a demonstration
of the imaginative leaps of a poet. The red percussion of their fires,
“all laden galleries and silence” - such expressions show how Welty,
while seeming to present the literal, moves in the direction of a deeper
exactitude.
The feeling that the whole world had receded from the town
shows how while the scene is described with an exactitude, it is the
human response and the human event which seem to be central to the
description. While the description gives the reader the feeling that he
is being held in the contemplation of a scene, all the time the
9
movement is in the direction of the human event which is a
dominating feature of the story.
As Welty says in “Place in Fiction”, place gives the theme, and
“Human Life is Fiction’s Only Theme.”16 Further, for Eudora Welty,
a specific place, suggested a specific story. Out of the colomnaded
house came the stoiy, ‘Asphodel’. Out of the Rodney’s landing and
the Natchez Trace country beyond came the extraordinary short
novel, The Robber Bridegroom. A house, a cafe, a village, a
suburban garden, a station waiting-hall, a lonely farm, a dance hall
appeal to her. A typical example is the enigmatic story of the Negro
Orchestra leader in a Negro-town cafe, ‘Power House.’
Eudora Welty makes a realistic evocation of the Mississippi
background. She took hundreds of photographs collected into an
album, ‘One Time, One Place’. The following passage reveals her art
of story-telling, and the connection between the impulse that made
her take the photographs and her literary urge.
I learned quickly enough when to click the
shutter, but What I was becoming aware of
move slowly was a story-writer’s truth: the
thing to wait on, to reach there in time for,
is the moment in which people reveal
themselves. You have to be ready, in
10
yourself; you have to know the moment
when you see it. The human face and the
human body are eloquent in themselves, and
wayward, and a snapshot is a moment’s
glimpse (as a story may be a long look, a
growing contemplation) into what never
stops moving, never ceases to express for
itself something of our common feeling.
Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then
when it does come, how unpredictable it
turns out to be, after all.17
Welty, typical of a sensitive southerner, is deeply concerned
with the racial unhappiness and the violence of the sixties. But as a
creative artist, she refrains from offering an overt treatment of the
southern problem. She precludes from her considerations the
propagandist’s approach and eschews distinctions based on externals.
She is interested in the life within and in offering a blend of her
personal visions and universal myths. An examination of the black
musicians in the short story ‘Power House’ or Old Phoenix Jackson in
‘A Worn Path’, or the face of the retired mid-wife, Ida Me Toy,
shows how cruel and limiting any system is which discriminates
against such people. Eudora Welty’s object in writing these stories is
to celebrate the forms, the lives and the natures of certain unique
individuals who nevertheless happen to be black. In an interview with
11
Reynolds Price for the New York Times Review of Books on the
occasion of the publication of the volume of her essays. ‘The Eye of
the Story’, she replied to the question, “Do you have a sense of a
single source within yourself from which the stories come?” in the
following words:
Well I could answer generally, I think it
probably is a lyrical impulse to - I don’t
know if the word praise is right or not ....
That must be the most common impulse that
most of us do share and I think it’s a good
one to share... I think it presumes that you
will be attentive to life, not closed to it but
open to it.18
Placed against the Natchez Trace background, the validity of a
work like The Robber Bridegroom lies in the human motivations
apparent in the history of a time and in the timeless fairy tale. The
Robber Bridegroom, set in Mississippi when it was under the rule of
Spain in the late eighteenth century, is a novel of antiquity containing
characters with real and folk lore elements. Eudora Welty’s fictional
countryside, like Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha, provides the
setting for many of her tales. In her Losing Battles, Welty has
included a map of the place, in the North-East of Mississippi, whose
major elements are the road (‘Trace’ means a path or road) which
12
crosses the country from South to North and the Railway track which
crosses from West to East.
There are novelists who wrote about place for its own sake.
The south has made more than its share of this type in the form not
only of the literary ‘drifters’ who specialize in out of the way places,
but native writers who suddenly realize the marketability of the home
material. In some cases, writers of small talent make a reputation by
presenting their region in a light favourable to the national audience at
a particular time, without strict regard to accuracy.
Welty writes out of the what she calls a “saturation of place,”
by which she means not only the outward visible country but the
ways of thinking and feeling that lie too deep for the casual observer.
For place has its own free mansory, which puts the outsider at a
disadvantage. He is never quite at home, in spite of research or even
long residence, unless that residence means striking roots in the soil.
Faulkner
is
one
of the
richest
in
delineating
the
Yoknapatawpha landscape. He is a triumphant example in America of
the mastery of place in fiction. How different is the world of
Caldwell, who came on the scene about the same time as Faulkner,
with superficially at least the same raw interest in Southern life?
13
Tobacco Road and As / lay Dying are about the agricultural areas of
Georgia and Mississippi, gross, funny and improbable. Yet such is the
devotion of Faulkner to place that his Bundrens have immediacy of
life. It is all a matter of commitment. Faulkner’s Bundrens are more
than a phenomenon to be eradicated by special planning. Shut off on
their wretched hill farms in the backwash of southern history, they
gaze out on the world with tragic and sometimes comic futility,
suggestive of
the south in the aftermath of the war and
reconstruction.
Even Welty sometimes seems too conscious of the theory she
has formulated concerning place and too conscious about being a
Mississippian. With so much of folk material lying about her, she
sometimes goes too far and drowns her story in folktale as she does in
Losing Battles.
One comes away from the Beechain family reunion with the
feeling that Welty set out to write a novel about a particular family so
as to communicate the texture of life in the hill country of North
Mississippi. This, of course, she does superbly. With a single stroke
of pen, a gesture or turn of phase, she sums up the life of her people
in the process of narration. In ‘A Worn Path,’ an old Negro woman
14
stops a white man on the streets of Natchez and asks her to tie her
shoe. The white woman lays down her Christian bundles on the
pavement and ties up the old woman’s shoe, an act which says a great
deal about race relations in a particular time and place. To the casual
observer, the scene is startling. The white woman is too proud to
refuse the request and the Negro has learned how to take “subtle
revenge” on white people by exploiting their pride in this way. Both
the white woman and the black woman know their responsibility from
a long contractual relationship of the two races. In isolation, the scene
is meaningless, grotesque. In the context of place, it takes on the
quality of poetry.
For the southern writer, the history of his country places on him
the burden of self-consciousness. He may go too far in this
identification with place in the belief that his region has a special
value in the fictional field. He writes from a land whose natural aspect
as well as its histoiy and social forms strike him in a vivid, almost
tactile way. If he loves it, as Welty does, his fidelity to place can add
an important dimension to his art. It is the writer’s duty, Welty says,
“not to disdown any part of our heritage.”19 but to accept it all as
uniquely our own and to build on it. Like Carson McCullers, Welty
shares in the southern tradition of the neo-conservatives. But her
15
attitude towards the shape of Southern society is at best passive. In
spite of a defined social scheme present in her work, Welty’s
preoccupation is with the mystery of personality. As Faulkner
portrayed the large outer world of historical action, Welty would paint
her picture and poetically evoke the inner world of psychological
nuance.
Ruth Vande Kiefi noticed that biographical facts give us the
reason to call Welty a “Second Generation” southerner. Her parents
came from Ohio and West Virginia, that is partly responsible for her
detachment from “that strong sense of blood inheritance” which
shaped so many other southern writers. Welty’s place is, of course,
Mississippi - its towns, rivers, and Delta bottoms,20 and her distinct
sense of place has helped her to sift the essential in a character,
incident or setting from their relevant, meaningless and random
elements of life. Place is an all inclusive framework which gives her a
sense of direction and a point of view. Welty’s essay, ‘Place in
Fiction,’ speaks about a novelistic aspect thus: “I think the sense of
place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind”21.
This indeed sounds as if Welty is echoing the Agrarian Manifesto of
1930 and taking her stand. “Sense of place gives equilibrium,
extended, it is sense of direction too.” Clearly this language refers to
16
people in general: “It is through place that we put down roots,
wherever and whenever birth, chance, fate or our travelling selves
may set us down; but where the roots reach toward is the deep and
running vein of the human understanding”.22 This shows how in
Eudora Welty’s fiction place is bound up with human experience.
As a southern regionalist with a difference in the exercise of
her creative imagination, Miss Welty lives in close proximity to the
past. Her constant effort is to repossess the past so as to make it
meaningfully depict the contemporary experience of her characters.
Though the past of the south, of the Natchez Trace country, interests
her most, her treatment of character and situation does not reveal any
attachment to history in an ordinary sense. One becomes aware of
myth and legend in her treatment of the past. Her treatment of the
myth, which is another dimension of her preoccupation with the past,
gives rise, as Chester Eisinger has noted, to the “conviction that
mythic patterns are deeply ingrained in the human consciousness and
possess therefore a perennial relevance.”23
Welty’s Delta Wedding celebrates the gracious southern life.
The new woman of the south emerge in this novel. Virgie Rainey in
The Golden Apples and Laurel Hand in The Optimist’s Daughter
17
have forged independent, clearly feminine identities. The problem of
identity confronts us in the fiction of Carson McCullers, Flannery
O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Like Carson McCullers, Welty
constantly examines the question of identity and isolation while
forcing upon her characters the demands of love which can be
fulfilled only through communication. Her themes are those universal
preoccupations that shape all modem literature - isolation and human
need for community and communication, the price of growing up
with innocence lost and knowledge hard-won.
Delia Wedding, a full length novel published in 1946, was
often greeted with the same “here we go again” criticism. John Crowe
Ransom sees beyond the setting and characters and praises Welty’s
skills with actual telling of the story as she alternates between the
‘drama’ of dialogue and external action, on the one hand, and interior
monologue on the other. “Peggy Prenshaw shows Welty’s portrayal
of the complex social structure of the twentieth century south to be
anything but stereotyped in Cultural Patterns in Eudora Welty’s
‘Delta Wedding’ ‘The Demonstrators.’ John Edward Hardy’s 1952
essay on “Delta Wedding as Region and Symbol” sees Welty at her
best in this novel, focusing on her skill at conveying the meaning of
18
her novel in the whole, particularity in the moment, the single,
illuminating still act of private perception.24
By the 1949 publication of The Golden Apples, more and more
criticism was being focused on Welty’s remarkable command of
narrative technique. Margaret Marshall’s review for The Nation
continues the complaint that Welty has indulged herself in finespun
writing that becomes her mode. One is scarcely ever made aware of
the mixed racial background which must surely affects the quality of
life. Interestingly enough, Katherine Anne Porter, in her introduction
to A Curtain of Green eight years earlier, had identified and
answered this criticism by saying that there is an unanswerable,
indispensable moral law, on which Welty is grounded firmly, and
this, it would seem, is simple domain enough. These laws have never
been the peculiar property of any party or creed or nation. They relate
to that true and human world of which the artist is a living part. Since
the publication of ‘Where is the Voice Coming From?’ in 1963 and
‘The
Demonstrators’
in
1966,
both
in
The New
Yorker,
acknowledgement has been widespread of Welty’s concern for and
gift of expressing the racial conflicts of the region. Vande Kieft in her
revised study goes so far as to call “The Demonstrators” possibly the
greatest story to come out of the Civil Rights era.25
19
Much of the criticism of The Golden Apples has focused on
Welty’s use of myth. Vande Kiefts longest chapter in both editions of
her book examines The Golden Apples, with mythic motifs receiving
much of her attention. Thomas L.McHaney in “Eudora Welty and the
Multitudinous Golden Apples” traces Greek and Celtic mythological
references and surveys criticism of the work up to 1973. Patterns of
initiation are the subject of Carol S.Manning’s “Male Initiation,
Welty Style” with emphasis on “Moon Lake” J.A. Bryant, Jr,
examines The Golden Apples and finds a special way of seeing or
perceiving.
Moving in a new direction, Patricia S.Yaeger in “Because a
Fire was in My Head: Eudora Welty and the Dialogic Imagination”
uses Mikhail Bakhtins linguistic theories to discuss The Golden
Apples as a beautifully crafted and gender preoccupied novel whose
emphasis on sexuality and intertextuality has not been fully
comprehended.26
Losing Bottles (1970) have proved a favourite Welty novel for
critical discussion. For example, five essays in Prenshaw’s Critical
Essays alone deal specifically with Losing Battles. Jonathan Yardly,
reviewing it in The New Republic commented on the sheer variety of
20
Welty, her unparalleled use of simile. Louise Gossett uses the concept
of the pairing of opposites to examine themes and narrative methods
throughout Welty’s fiction. Larry Reynolds also discusses narrative
structure and theme in “Enlightening Darkness: Theme and Structure
in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles and points out that beneath its
entertaining surface the story of an intense struggle for survival is
subtly and carefully told. Criticism of the novel has frequently
focused on the family and / or the family versus Julia Mortimer, as in
James Boatwright’s “Speech and Silence in Losing Battles” and
William McMillen’s “Conflict and Resolution in Losing Battles”.
Suzanne Marrs has written three articles that trace the development of
characters and plot: “The Making of Losing Battles: Plot Revision.”27
The Optimist’s Daughter appeared in the book form in 1972
and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The work received almost
unanimous praise by critics in early reviews, including that of
Granville Hicks, who in “universal Regionalist” writes of being awed
by the novella’s richness.” Marilyn Arnold traces the imagery, in
particular the bird imagery, in the novel to show characters: especially
Laurel’s revelations about freedom and evading the past. Lucinda
H.Mackethan examines The Optimist’s Daughter, along with Delta
Wedding, Golden Apples and Losing Battles, and synthesizes many
21
of the main modes of Welty criticism as she discusses place, sense of
identity, relationships, time, and perception. She feels that the
characters’ main challenge in the works “is to perceive, understand,
and transmit the moments when place yields up its ‘extraordinary’
values.” She notes a greater “sense of fragmentation” in The
Optimist’s Daughter because of Welty’s new treatment of the
“insider” character.28
In more than five decades since her first stoiy was published in
1936, Eudora Welty has created a large, varied, and most impressive
body of prose that continues to appeal to readers and to challenge
critics. This brief survey of the scholarship surrounding her canon is
merely suggestive, certainly not exhaustive. For as Welty’s literary
statute continues to grow, scholarly examinations of her works and
canon have begun to multiply.
22
References
1.
Katherine Anne Porter, Introduction to A Curtain of Green
and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1979), xiii,
2.
Ruth M. Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (Boston: G.K.Hall, 1962;
rev. 1987); Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984).
3.
Peggy W.Prenshaw, ed: Conversations with Eudora Welty
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).
4.
Noel Polk. “A Eudora Welty Checklist”. Mississippi Quarterly
26 (Fall 1973), 663-664.
5.
Victor H. Thompson, Eudora Welty: A Reference Guide
(Boston: G.K.Hall, 1976).
6.
Prenshaw, “Eudora Welly,” in American Women Writers:
Bibliographical Essays, ed. Maurice Duke, Jackson R.Bryer,
and M.Thomas Inge Westport. Conn. Greenwood Press, 1983),
233-67.
7.
Bethary C. Swearingen, Eudora Welty: A Critical
Bibliography, 1936-1958 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi 1984).
8.
Pearl Amelia McHaney, “A Eudora Welty Checklist: 19731986.” Mississippi Quarterly 39 (Fall 1986), 651-97.
9.
Robert Penn Warren, “The Love and the Separateness in Miss
Welty”. Kenyon Review 6 (spring 1944), 246-59, rpt. In
Selected Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 156-69.
10.
Michael Kreyling, Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).
11.
Albert J. Delvin, Eudora Welty’s Chronicle: A Story of
Mississippi Life (Jackson: University State Press of
Mississippi, 1983).
12.
Alfred J.Appeal, Jr. A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of
Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1965).
23
13.
Marie Antonette Manz-Kunz, Eudora Welty: Aspects of
Reality in her Short Fiction (Berne: Francke Verlag, 1971).
Zelma Tumor Howard, The Rhetoric of Eudora Welty’s
Short Stories (Jackson: University and College Press of
Mississippi, 1973); Jennifer Lynn Randisi, A Tissue of Lies:
Eudora Welty and the Southern Romance (Washington:
University Press of America, 1982); Carol Sue Manning, With
ears opening like Morning Glories; Eudora Welty and the
Love of Story Telling (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press
1985); Louisie Westling, Sacred Groves and Ravaged
Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers,
and Flannery O’Connor (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia
Press, 1985).
14.
Paul Binding, Separate Country: A Literary Journey through
the American South (New York: Paddington, 1979), 137.
15.
Eudora Welty, “First Love,” Selected Stories of Eudora
Welty: containing all of a “A Curtain of Green and Other
Stories” and “The Wide Net and Other Stories” with an
Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter (New York: The
Modem Library 1971), 4-5.
16.
Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” Rpt. In Critical Approaches
to Fiction, ed. S.K.Kumar, and Keith McKean (New York,
1968), 254.
17.
Eudora Welty, “One Time,” Mississippi in the Depression: A
Snapshot Album (New York: Random Press, 1971), 7-8.
18.
Eudora Welty, ‘Interview, New York Times Review of Books
(7 May 1978), cited in Paul Binding Separate Country (New
York: Paddington, 1979), 140.
19.
Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction”, Rpt. In Critical Approaches
to Fiction, ed. S.K.Kumar and Keith McKean (New York:
168), 264.
20.
Dean Flower, “Eudora Welty come for Away” Hudson Review
38.3 (Autumn, 1985) 474.
21.
Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction” Rpt. In Critical Approaches
to Fiction, ed. S.K.Kumar and Keith McKean (New York:
1968), 259.
24
22.
Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” Rpt. In Critical Approaches
to Fiction, ed. S.K.Kumar and Keith McKean (New York,
1968), 263-64.
23.
Chester E.Eisinger, Fiction of the
University of Chicago Press, 1963), 261.
24.
John Crow Ransom, “Delta Fiction”, Kenyon Review 8
(summer 1946) 503; Prenshaw, “Cultural Patterns in Eudora
Welty’s Delta Wedding and “The Demonstrators,” Notes on
Mississippi Writers 3 (Fall 1970: 51-70; John Edward Hardy,
“Delta Wedding, as Region and Symbol; Sewanee Review 60
(Summer 1952): 397-417.
25.
Margaret Marshall, “Notes by the Way” Nation 10 September
1949, 2. Marrs, “The Metaphor of Race in Eudora Welty’s
Fiction,” (Southern Review 22 Autumn 1986): 697-707.
26.
Manning, “Male Initiation, Welty Style; Regionalism and The
Female Imagination 4, no.2 (1978): 53-60. Bryant “Seeing
Double in The Golden Apples: Sewanee Review 82 (Spring
1974): 300-15; Patricia S. Yaeger,” Because A Fire was in my
Head, Eudora Welty and the Dialogic Imagination” Mississippi
Quarterly 39 (Fall 1986).
27.
Jonathan Yardley, ‘The Last Good One’, New Republic 162 (9
May 1970): 33-36; Louise Y.Gossett, “Eudora Welty’s New
Novel: The Comedy of Loss”. Southern Literary Journal 3
(Fall 1970): 122-37; Lariy J. Reynolds, “Enlightening
Darkness: Theme and Structure in Eudora Welty’s Losing
Battles”, Journal of Narrative Technique (Spring 1978): 13340; James Boatwright, “Speech and Silence in Losing Battles:
Shenandoah 25 (Spring 1974): 3-14; William McMillen,
“Conflict and Resolution in Losing Battles, Critique 15 (1973):
110-24; Marrs, “The Making of Losing Battles: Jack Renfro’s
Evolution; Mississippi Quarterly 37 (Fall 1984): 469-74.
Marrs. The Making of Losing Battles: Judge Moody
Transformed, Notes on Mississippi, Southern Literary Journal
18 (Fall 1985): 40-49.
25
Forties,
(Chicago:
28.
Graville Hicks, “Universal Regionalist: A Review of Eudora
Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter.” New Leader 55 (7 August
1972) 19: Reynolds Prince, ‘The Onlooker, Smiling: An Early
Reading of the Optimist’s Daughter”. Shenandoah 20 (spring
1969): 58-73; Marilyn Arnold, images of memory in Eudora
Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter; Southern Literary Journal
14 (Spring 1982): 28-38, Lucinda H. Mackethan, “To see
Things in their Time: The Act of Fours in Eudora’s Welty’s
Fiction,” American Literature 50 (May 1978): 258-75.
26