Stephen M. Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036736
- eISBN:
- 9781621039143
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036736.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism in the United States largely through ...
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This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism 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, the 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 Welty’s 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 Dali, 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.Less
This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism 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, the 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 Welty’s 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 Dali, 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.
Stephen M. Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036736
- eISBN:
- 9781621039143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036736.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green ...
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This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green demonstrate defiance of the tyranny of actuality, and illustrate Welty’s shuttling between actuality and abstraction. It also shows the early orientation of Welty’s artistic prejudices, which would guide her during much of her career. Over the years, Welty’s view of imaginative transformation and the strategies required to realize the principle would develop and intensify, but in this first volume of short stories she holds to her fundamental conviction that fiction’s point of view should glow, illuminating the surreality of the waking life in dream and vice versa.Less
This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green demonstrate defiance of the tyranny of actuality, and illustrate Welty’s shuttling between actuality and abstraction. It also shows the early orientation of Welty’s artistic prejudices, which would guide her during much of her career. Over the years, Welty’s view of imaginative transformation and the strategies required to realize the principle would develop and intensify, but in this first volume of short stories she holds to her fundamental conviction that fiction’s point of view should glow, illuminating the surreality of the waking life in dream and vice versa.
Jonathan W. Gray
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036491
- eISBN:
- 9781621030539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036491.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant ...
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This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant political and social thought in the United States. The only manuscript Welty produced within the period, which was also a trying time in her life, was a brief children’s story called The Shoe Bird. Welty could not focus on her writing because of her demanding mother, who drove away the homecare nurses that Welty hired, and it was only when Welty was able to free herself from her familial duties that she was able to get back to writing. When she did, she produced her two finest novels: Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter.Less
This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant political and social thought in the United States. The only manuscript Welty produced within the period, which was also a trying time in her life, was a brief children’s story called The Shoe Bird. Welty could not focus on her writing because of her demanding mother, who drove away the homecare nurses that Welty hired, and it was only when Welty was able to free herself from her familial duties that she was able to get back to writing. When she did, she produced her two finest novels: Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter.
Harriet Pollack
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617033032
- eISBN:
- 9781617033056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617033032.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter explores Eudora Welty’s use of allusions in her work. It first maps out the process characteristically initiated by Welty’s allusions, and then examines the specific uses she makes of ...
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This chapter explores Eudora Welty’s use of allusions in her work. It first maps out the process characteristically initiated by Welty’s allusions, and then examines the specific uses she makes of that process in three allusive fictions: “The Wide Net,” The Robber Bridegroom, and its story double, “At The Landing”.Less
This chapter explores Eudora Welty’s use of allusions in her work. It first maps out the process characteristically initiated by Welty’s allusions, and then examines the specific uses she makes of that process in three allusive fictions: “The Wide Net,” The Robber Bridegroom, and its story double, “At The Landing”.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around ...
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As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. Polk’s essays in this book maintain an abiding interest in his major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work’s larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse—the bricks and mortar, as it were—and a work’s grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk’s scholarship. The book is a collection of his essays from the late 1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South’s literary heritage, it asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.Less
As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. Polk’s essays in this book maintain an abiding interest in his major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work’s larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse—the bricks and mortar, as it were—and a work’s grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk’s scholarship. The book is a collection of his essays from the late 1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South’s literary heritage, it asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.
Jonathan W. Gray
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036491
- eISBN:
- 9781621030539
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036491.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary ...
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The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.Less
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. ...
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Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.Less
Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.
M. Thomas Inge (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496803382
- eISBN:
- 9781496806789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496803382.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence ...
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This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence throughout the world as has Faulkner. He has been called a “writer's writer,” one who is held up as a preceptor and model for other writers to emulate. Novelists, playwrights, and poets have expressed their varying opinions on the value of Faulkner's example as a creative writer. This book contains essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews published over the last eight decades by novelists, poets, and dramatists about Faulkner, his fiction, and the power of his accomplishment. These include Donald Davidson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Gabriel García Márquez.Less
This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence throughout the world as has Faulkner. He has been called a “writer's writer,” one who is held up as a preceptor and model for other writers to emulate. Novelists, playwrights, and poets have expressed their varying opinions on the value of Faulkner's example as a creative writer. This book contains essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews published over the last eight decades by novelists, poets, and dramatists about Faulkner, his fiction, and the power of his accomplishment. These include Donald Davidson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Gabriel García Márquez.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312120
- eISBN:
- 9781846315190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315190.010
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in ...
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This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in her fiction; Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (1935), a novel about Depression America told in the present tense; two documentaries by John Dos Passos, which were produced to support the democratic front in the Spanish Civil War – Spain in Flames (1937) and The Spanish Earth (1937); the documentary You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a collaboration between the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell and the Fortune photographer Margaret Bourke-White; and James Agee, one of the most famous documentary authors of this period, whose works combined interest in film, photography, fiction, and reportage.Less
This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in her fiction; Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (1935), a novel about Depression America told in the present tense; two documentaries by John Dos Passos, which were produced to support the democratic front in the Spanish Civil War – Spain in Flames (1937) and The Spanish Earth (1937); the documentary You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a collaboration between the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell and the Fortune photographer Margaret Bourke-White; and James Agee, one of the most famous documentary authors of this period, whose works combined interest in film, photography, fiction, and reportage.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the persistence of outsiders, rootless wanderers, hitchhikers, the lonely, inarticulate and frustrated, the unloved and the unlovely, in Eudora Welty’s fiction. It also ...
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This chapter examines the persistence of outsiders, rootless wanderers, hitchhikers, the lonely, inarticulate and frustrated, the unloved and the unlovely, in Eudora Welty’s fiction. It also considers scenes where land and water meet, from Delta Wedding to “The Bride of the Innisfallen,” “Going to Naples,” “Circe,” and “No Place for You, My Love.” In addition, the chapter discusses the connection between traveling and family as well as familial violence against women in Welty’s works.Less
This chapter examines the persistence of outsiders, rootless wanderers, hitchhikers, the lonely, inarticulate and frustrated, the unloved and the unlovely, in Eudora Welty’s fiction. It also considers scenes where land and water meet, from Delta Wedding to “The Bride of the Innisfallen,” “Going to Naples,” “Circe,” and “No Place for You, My Love.” In addition, the chapter discusses the connection between traveling and family as well as familial violence against women in Welty’s works.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s novel Ponder Heart, arguing that it is her oddest book and that it is a deliberate collection of every tawdry cliché of southern literature. It ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s novel Ponder Heart, arguing that it is her oddest book and that it is a deliberate collection of every tawdry cliché of southern literature. It contends that the novel does not feel like parody because it does not protect itself through the distances of irony which characterize modernist narratives. The chapter also considers a scene from one of Welty’s earliest short stories, “Magic”—the image of the family in their living room—and, finally, examines how Welty presents some grimmer realities about domestic violence.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s novel Ponder Heart, arguing that it is her oddest book and that it is a deliberate collection of every tawdry cliché of southern literature. It contends that the novel does not feel like parody because it does not protect itself through the distances of irony which characterize modernist narratives. The chapter also considers a scene from one of Welty’s earliest short stories, “Magic”—the image of the family in their living room—and, finally, examines how Welty presents some grimmer realities about domestic violence.
Casie E. Hermansson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732306
- eISBN:
- 9781604733532
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732306.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of ...
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This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of detective fiction during the years of World War I and influenza pandemic of 1918, and the strain of misogyny evident in the crime stories about Bluebeard. The chapter discusses the works of three women writers who explicitly addressed the Bluebeard story as a vehicle to comment on gender relations and to issue a modernist challenge to the traditional narrative: Beatrix Potter’s novella Sister Anne (1932), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story “Bluebeard’s Daughter” in The Cat’s Cradle-Book (1940), and Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942). It also discusses modern film versions of Bluebeard such as In Love from a Stranger (1937) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), as well as the so-called “Bluebeard cycle” of films including Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Secret Beyond the Door (1948).Less
This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of detective fiction during the years of World War I and influenza pandemic of 1918, and the strain of misogyny evident in the crime stories about Bluebeard. The chapter discusses the works of three women writers who explicitly addressed the Bluebeard story as a vehicle to comment on gender relations and to issue a modernist challenge to the traditional narrative: Beatrix Potter’s novella Sister Anne (1932), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story “Bluebeard’s Daughter” in The Cat’s Cradle-Book (1940), and Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942). It also discusses modern film versions of Bluebeard such as In Love from a Stranger (1937) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), as well as the so-called “Bluebeard cycle” of films including Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Secret Beyond the Door (1948).
Louise Westling
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255658
- eISBN:
- 9780823261208
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255658.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as implicitly ecological, developing within the context of phenomenology initiated by Husserl and further expanded by Heidegger. Describing ...
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This chapter introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as implicitly ecological, developing within the context of phenomenology initiated by Husserl and further expanded by Heidegger. Describing Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive focus on the body in Phenomenology of Perception and his ontology of dynamic intertwining or chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible, the discussion places particular emphasis on his lifelong engagement with modern science and its culmination in the Nature lectures in which he explored the philosophical consequences of twentieth-century science. The chapter concludes with analysis of literary explorations of embodiment by Eudora Welty and W.H. Auden.Less
This chapter introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as implicitly ecological, developing within the context of phenomenology initiated by Husserl and further expanded by Heidegger. Describing Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive focus on the body in Phenomenology of Perception and his ontology of dynamic intertwining or chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible, the discussion places particular emphasis on his lifelong engagement with modern science and its culmination in the Nature lectures in which he explored the philosophical consequences of twentieth-century science. The chapter concludes with analysis of literary explorations of embodiment by Eudora Welty and W.H. Auden.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s short story “Old Mr. Marblehall,” and compares the story to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” All three ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s short story “Old Mr. Marblehall,” and compares the story to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” All three stories are narrated by observers who find something anomalous in the behavior of a denizen of a crowded city, and who appear to take for granted some things that Welty does not. The chapter suggests that Mr. Marblehall is both a man of, and a man who feels a sense of alienation from, the crowd of Natchez, Mississippi.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s short story “Old Mr. Marblehall,” and compares the story to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” All three stories are narrated by observers who find something anomalous in the behavior of a denizen of a crowded city, and who appear to take for granted some things that Welty does not. The chapter suggests that Mr. Marblehall is both a man of, and a man who feels a sense of alienation from, the crowd of Natchez, Mississippi.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Violence is pervasive in Eudora Welty’s fiction, a normal part of women’s everyday experience. This chapter offers a reading of Welty’s short stories “The Purple Hat,” “Magic,” and “The Doll,” all ...
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Violence is pervasive in Eudora Welty’s fiction, a normal part of women’s everyday experience. This chapter offers a reading of Welty’s short stories “The Purple Hat,” “Magic,” and “The Doll,” all three of which concern women dabbling in pleasure and tackle domestic violence. “Magic” is a grim story about defloration, “The Doll” focuses on two lovers alienated in and by their love, and “The Purple Hat” is about a middle-aged woman who wears a purple hat and whom the narrator believes has been murdered twice.Less
Violence is pervasive in Eudora Welty’s fiction, a normal part of women’s everyday experience. This chapter offers a reading of Welty’s short stories “The Purple Hat,” “Magic,” and “The Doll,” all three of which concern women dabbling in pleasure and tackle domestic violence. “Magic” is a grim story about defloration, “The Doll” focuses on two lovers alienated in and by their love, and “The Purple Hat” is about a middle-aged woman who wears a purple hat and whom the narrator believes has been murdered twice.
Aiken Charles S.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037122
- eISBN:
- 9781604731637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037122.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter shows the significance of material culture in distinguishing places and culture groups. Geographers have defined material culture as “all physical, material objects made and used by a ...
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This chapter shows the significance of material culture in distinguishing places and culture groups. Geographers have defined material culture as “all physical, material objects made and used by a culture group, including clothing, buildings, tools, instruments, furniture, and artwork.” Although, a considerable literature on economic regions of the United States has been developed, geographers have given little attention to the anatomy and physiology of culture regions. A beginning to evaluation of material culture in the works of Faulkner is Eudora Welty’s essay on place in fiction. What Welty wrote of place can also be said of material culture. In most fiction, material culture is critical to the setting, the definition of characters, and even the theme, but cultural objects usually are not the focus of the narrative.Less
This chapter shows the significance of material culture in distinguishing places and culture groups. Geographers have defined material culture as “all physical, material objects made and used by a culture group, including clothing, buildings, tools, instruments, furniture, and artwork.” Although, a considerable literature on economic regions of the United States has been developed, geographers have given little attention to the anatomy and physiology of culture regions. A beginning to evaluation of material culture in the works of Faulkner is Eudora Welty’s essay on place in fiction. What Welty wrote of place can also be said of material culture. In most fiction, material culture is critical to the setting, the definition of characters, and even the theme, but cultural objects usually are not the focus of the narrative.
