Presenting the first full-length collection of essays on Eudora Welty's novel, Delta Wedding (1946), this volume is the fourth book in Rodopi Press's Dialogue Series. Within these pages, emerging and experienced literary critics engage in an exciting dialogue about Welty's noted novel, presenting a wide range of scholarship that focuses on feminist concerns, pays tribute to the rhetoric of exclusion and empowerment, examines the role of outsider and boundaries, explores meaning-making, and highlights the novel's humor and musicality. This volume will no doubt be of interest to Welty aficianados as well as southern studies and feminist scholars and to those who are interested in the craft of writing fiction.

The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923 – afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone. Laura McRaven travels down the Delta to attend her cousin Dabney's wedding. At the Fairchild plantation her family envelop her in a tidal wave of warmth, teases and comfort. As the big day approaches, tensions inevitably rise to the surface.

These two classic novels by the Pulitzer Prize winning author depict 20th century Southern life “with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). Set in 1923, Eudora Welty’s first novel, The Delta Wedding, centers around the Fairchild family and their preparations for a wedding at their Mississippi plantation. Drama leads to drama, and the result is a surprising portrait of a large and clamorous Southern family that is “nothing short of riotous” (The New Yorker). In The Ponder Heart, Daniel Ponder of Clay County, Mississippi, is giving away family heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the family fortune from Daniel’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves her Uncle Daniel, she’s decided to have him institutionalized in this “wonderful tragicomedy” (The New York Times).

Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City where the surrealists exhibited and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fact, Welty's first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York's premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study's interpretations also foreground how her writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dal', Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South, a literary strategy that revealed not only cultural farsightedness but great artistic daring.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Eudora Welty's first important publication, this special collection of critical essays celebrates her achievement as an incomparable literary artist. Since 1936, when "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was published, the excellence of her stories, novels, essays and collections has been giving unceasing acclaim, and she has become one of the most honored and most esteemed of American writers. The essays in this collection convey the scholarly pleasure one finds in studying the works of Eudora Welty. Although they employ varying critical methodologies, pleasure is at the source of the examinations published in this book. In these essays, forma, mythic, and thematic criticism from a variety of scholars offers fresh access to A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and Delta Wedding. One bibliographical study included shows Welty to be keenly attuned to the nuances of meaning during the writing and revising of The Opti

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty's writing and photography were the subject of more than one thousand reviews, of which over two hundred are collected here. From the first, reviewers loved Welty's language and disparaged her lack of plot. Their eager anticipation for the next book is rarely diminished by the shock of reading entirely different styles of writing. Her work was admired even as it challenged its readers. The reviews selected for reprinting here represent the diversity of Welty's reception and assessment. Reviews from small towns, urban centers, noted fiction writers, professional reviewers, academics, and everyday readers are included. The comments of reviewing rivals such as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, Nation and New Yorker, when read side by side, reveal the nuances both of the reviewers and of the work of this important Southern writer.

This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.

This up-to-date fourth edition of the most important and interesting data--on a day by day basis--throughout American history includes more than 1,400 new entries with information on a wide variety of subjects--both the "important" matters (Supreme Court decisions, war events, scientific breakthroughs, etc.) and the lesser known but thought provoking incidents and phenomena (societal changes, unexpected events) that add richness and depth to American history.

This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.