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.
Gary Richards
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496814531
- eISBN:
- 9781496814579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496814531.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This essay details how Welty’s “The Wide Net” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” allow for nuanced explorations of male homosociality and queer male bodies in college classrooms. Unlike “Music from Spain,” ...
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This essay details how Welty’s “The Wide Net” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” allow for nuanced explorations of male homosociality and queer male bodies in college classrooms. Unlike “Music from Spain,” which, despite its focus on male same-sex desire, is a problematic text, these two earlier stories have marked early- to mid-twentieth-century settings in the small-town South and allow students to refine their thinking about sexuality within a specifically regional context. In particular, “The Wide Net” is a hymn to male homosociality that Welty juxtaposes against heterosexual marriage and procreation. The story also invites readers to consider biographical contexts, especially concerning Welty’s relationship with John Fraiser Robinson. Similarly, “Why I Live at the P.O.” allows students to read the cross-dressing Uncle Rondo as a queer male body and invites discussion and definition of cross-dressing, fetishism, transvestism, transsexual identity and embodiment, and other trans issues.Less
This essay details how Welty’s “The Wide Net” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” allow for nuanced explorations of male homosociality and queer male bodies in college classrooms. Unlike “Music from Spain,” which, despite its focus on male same-sex desire, is a problematic text, these two earlier stories have marked early- to mid-twentieth-century settings in the small-town South and allow students to refine their thinking about sexuality within a specifically regional context. In particular, “The Wide Net” is a hymn to male homosociality that Welty juxtaposes against heterosexual marriage and procreation. The story also invites readers to consider biographical contexts, especially concerning Welty’s relationship with John Fraiser Robinson. Similarly, “Why I Live at the P.O.” allows students to read the cross-dressing Uncle Rondo as a queer male body and invites discussion and definition of cross-dressing, fetishism, transvestism, transsexual identity and embodiment, and other trans issues.
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”.
